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PAPERS ON MUSICAL SUBJECTS 








CWOP OCW OG WHF OCW DG WHF OD 


The Works of (Carl Uan Vechten 


NOVELS 
PETER WHIFFLE: 8Is Lire AND works 
THE BLIND BOW-BOY 


a cartoon for a stained-glass window 


THE TATTOOED COUNTESS 


a romantic novel with a happy ending 
BOOKS ABOUT CATS 
THE TIGER IN THE HOUSE 
LORDS OF THE HOUSETOPS 
BOOKS ABOUT MUSIC 
INTERPRETERS 
RED 


Carl Van Vechten 


R E D 


PAPERS ON MUSICAL SUBJECTS 


ay dy 


TF OO WOT 06 WT 00 WT 06 WT 06 WE 06 WT OG NR 


New York - 1925 
ALFRED :A-+-KNOPF 





(ee Wii 





COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, 
INC. ‘ PUBLISHED, 1925 * SET UP, ELEC- 
TROTYPED AND PRINTED BY THE VAIL- 
BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - 
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TON & CO., NEW YORK * BOUND BY THE 
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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES 
OF AMERIOA 


For Ralph Barton, 


with my admiration, 
this superfluous pigment for his 


immarcescible palette 








ways enraged when they see it. 
ost ee iat 
| es! RoBERT SCHUMANN, 








_A Valedictory 


I 


Some ill-considered author once formulated a 
theory, which since has gained considerably more 
currency than it deserves, that the corps of critics 
is recruited from the ranks of unsuccessful novel- 
ists. It would be more easy to credit the con- 
verse of this fantastic supposition. Indeed, if 
nine-tenths of our novelists were critics it would 
not be possible for them to write such bad novels. 
Speaking for myself, I may say that I was both a 
dramatic and a music critic before I had conceived 
the idea that I should ever write a novel. 

Ten or twelve years ago, Miss Geraldine Far- 
rar remarked to an interviewer that singers 
should retire at the age of forty. In conversa- 
tion, at any rate, I remember often to have ex- 
pressed myself similarly in regard to critics of 
music. When IJ was younger I held the firm be- 
lief that after forty the cells hardened and that 
prejudices were formed which precluded the pos- 
sibility of the welcoming of novelty. From 
almost the moment I began to write on the sub- 
ject of music, therefore, I took it upon myself to 


[1x] 


A Valedictory 


attack the older men who had closed their minds 
to new ideas. However that may be, Miss Far- 
rar did not retire, and I did. 

For twenty years, with a fringe of months at 
either end of this period, I attended a concert or 
an opera or a play nearly every evening, and, 
for long stretches, nearly every afternoon as well. 
There have been countless occasions on which 
I have heard parts of three or four operas 
and concerts during the same evening. ‘This con- 
sistent activity was carried on in several cities: 
Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and 
elsewhere, and for at least sixteen of the twenty 
years I not only attended these entertainments, I 
also wrote about them. 

Towards the end I grew very tired of this 
routine. Music, the drama, singers and actors, 
began to have precious little new to say to me, 
and I began to have precious little new to say 
about them. Had I continued, I should have 
been obliged to repeat myself, besides boring my- 
self to death and running the by no means un- 
likely risk of catching a series of colds in 
draughty halls. Also, I recognized the symp- 
toms of age creeping upon me. I began to pre- 
fer Johann Strauss waltzes to the last sonatas 
of Beethoven; Chopin pleased me more than 
Brahms. I determined, therefore, to step aside 
to make way for the younger generation, who are 


[x] 


A Valedictory 


hereby given permission to transfer what I said 
ten years ago about Stravinsky and Satie to 
Darius Milhaud and the young Italians. 

There was a still more pregnant reason for my 
desertion of the camp of musical criticism. I 
seemed always to be about ten years ahead of 
most of the other critics and the orchestral con- 
ductors who make out programs. I missed the 
reviling of Wagner in New York, but I have 
watched the pundits of the press revile, in turn, 
Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky, only, 
in the end, after their ears, through repeated 
hearings, had grown accustomed to the new clang- 
tints, to accept these composers as part of the 
sacred hierarchy. My orchestral education was 
carried on under Theodore Thomas in Chicago. 
Now Thomas was not a great conductor, al- 
though he always gave honest musical readings 
of his scores, but he had one great virtue: he 
believed that new music should be heard. He 
performed, therefore, every important European 
composition as soon as possible after it had been 
performed abroad. As a result, when I arrived 
in New York in 1906, having listened to and 
appraised nearly all the major works of Strauss 
and Debussy composed up to that date, I was 
amazed to discover that the New York critics 
were still fighting about these composers, first 
underpraising them and a little later overpraising 


[x1 | 


A Valedictory 


them, for Strauss, at any rate, to my mind, has 
never been a whit superior as a composer to such 
a man as Liszt. In Paris, in 1913, I heard 
Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps and a good deal 
more of this Russian’s music. I wrote a pan- 
egyric about Le Sacre du Printemps in my first 
book,! published in 1915. In 1924, Le Sacre du 
Printemps has at last been performed in New 
York and the critics have at last accepted Stra- 
vinsky. So, indeed, apparently, have the conduc- 
tors who, until the past four years, hardly ever 
permitted his name to be emblazoned on their 
programs. ‘The job of music critic in New York, 
therefore, is certainly not an ideal occupation for 
a man with imagination and foresight. 

I might further urge that there were economic 
reasons for my shift of professions, for I real- 
ized but small sums of silver from this great out- 
lay of labour. My stipend from the newspapers 
for which I worked was decidedly modest; the 
several volumes of criticism which I published, 
while encomiastically reviewed (Henry Mencken 
hailed even my first book with delight, seeing in 
it possibly, as did Peter Whiffle, the germ of 
future achievement), enjoyed but a small sale. 
Most of them, indeed, were “‘remaindered.” I 
doubt if any one makes money out of music criti- 
cism. The late James Huneker, as prominent an 


1 Music After the Great War. 


[x11] 


A Valedictory 


exponent of the profession as any one I could 
name offhand, died poor, notwithstanding the 
fact that he had always led an extremely simple 
life. I wonder if even Ernest Newman, proba- 
bly the best living critic of music—or if not the 
best critic, at least the best writer on music—is 
driving about in a Rolls-Royce? Music criti- 
cism is poorly paid because it is poorly read. A 
novel, which is perhaps twice as easy to write— 
for any one who can write it at all—as such a 
book as the one that follows this preface, a novel, 
I say, which requires even in extreme instances 
about one-third as much documentation or funda- 
mental knowledge as even a book like this poor 
Red, not only brings one money, it also brings 
one readers. 

To be perfectly frank, however, I must state 
that the matter of economics never really entered 
into the question of my decision. Henry James 
once wrote, and he was writing about critics: 
‘The sense of effort is easily lost in the enthu- 
siasm of curiosity.” When I first began to at- 
tend the opera and concerts and the theatre I 
went because I liked to go. It was, I honestly 
believe, a desire to broaden my prospects in these 
respects that got me out of the state of Iowa, 
where opportunities of this nature were meagre. 
I think it was the primary reason for my leaving 
Chicago, after I had spent seven years in that 


[xiii] 


A Valedictory 


city. Iam sure that a hankering to hear Wagner 
in Munich was the inspiration for my first trip 
to Europe. Up until about the year 1918, in 
fact, my enthusiasm for the art under discussion 
sustained me in the belief that I should be writing 
about music throughout the length and breadth 
of my career. About that date I began to nourish 
doubts; sketches foreshadowing my future fictions 
began to appear in my books; I became uneasy 
in the concert hall; in short, I began to realize 
that I was nearly through. The last two papers 
in this volume reflect some of the reasons for 
this metamorphosis. 

Certainly, I do not regret those years. They 
supplied me with not a little knowledge and ex- — 
perience; they served to introduce me, in one way 
or another, to most of the famous people of the 
period, but when a thing is done, it is done, at 
least so far as I am concerned. I have not en- 
tered an opera house for several seasons, and my 
recent attendance on the concert hall has been 
limited to a few special occasions. 

I am delighted to see that many of my sug- 
gestions and prophecies have been realized. 
When I published my book about Spanish music, 
not one orchestral composition by a Spaniard, 
at least so far as I am aware, had yet been per- 
formed in our concert halls. ‘This absurd state 
of affairs has since been remedied. Stravinsky, 


[xiv | 


A Valedictory 


whom I have considered, since I first became ac- 
quainted with his music eleven years ago, the 
most important of living composers, is now gen- 
erally recognized as such. As for my plea that 
American popular music be taken more seriously, 
Eva Gauthier recently devoted an entire group 
on a recital program to jazz songs; a celebrated 
pianist has included Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the 
Keys in his repertory; Paul Whiteman has given a 
series of concerts devoted to American jazz, 
which have created a sensation in musical circles 
(even Mengelberg has come forward with his 
word of commendation) ; more than all, George 
Gershwin has composed and performed his Rhap- 
sody in Blue, a work in concerto form for piano 
and orchestra, in which jazz is utilized in a musi- 
cianly manner (as I predicted it would be in The 
Great American Composer) to create just the ef- 
fect that Liszt got into his rhapsodies by a use of 
Hungarian tunes, or Albéniz into his Iberia suite, 
which is based on suggestions in melody and 
rhythm of Spanish popular dances. Jazz may 
not be the last hope of American music, nor yet 
the best hope, but at present, I am convinced, it is 
its only hope. 


II 


There remained to solve, however, the problem 
of my early books, most of which are out of 


[ xv || 


A Valedictory 


print, and which, for sufficiently good reasons, 
I shall never republish in their original forms or 
under their original titles. ‘These volumes nat- 
urally contain much material that I should never 
care to reprint; moreover the later volumes in- 
clude not only papers on musical subjects but also 
my first attempts at fictional sketches, for it was 
necessary for me to convince myself that I could 
write fiction before I undertook to do so on a large 
scale. There were also to be considered a number 
of papers which had appeared in magazines, but 
which had not yet been published in book form. 

After a reperusal of the books in question—I 
may say that it is a habit of mine never to reread 
one of my books after it has come out, except for 
some reason like the present one—lI have se- 
lected such papers on musical subjects as I care 
to preserve, save for a few dealing with specific 
composers, later to find their niches in a book to 
be entitled Excavations, which will also include 
papers on certain figures in the literary world 
whose reputations I have had some share in res- 
cuing from comparative obscurity. 

Music for the Movies is lifted from Music 
and Bad Manners; Why Music is Unpopular, 
The Great American Composer, and The Im- 
portance of Electrical Picture Concerts, from In- 
terpreters and Interpretations; The Authorita- 
tive Work on American Music and The New Art 


[ xvi | 


A Valedictory 


of the Singer, from The Merry-Go-Round; 
Variations on a Theme by Havelock Ellis, On the 
Relative Difficulties of Depicting Heaven and 
Hell in Music, and On the Rewriting of Master- 
pieces, from In the Garret. Of the other three 
papers, none of which has previously been pub- 
lished in a book, Movies for Program Notes 
appeared in The Wave; On Hearing What You 
Want When You Want It, in The Musical Quar- 
terly, and Cordite for Concerts, in The Smart Set. 

I cannot say that I subscribe to all the general 
ideas expressed herein; as a matter of fact, they 
are not all entirely consistent, a state of affairs to 
have been expected in the work of a writer who 
apparently at heart was always creative rather 
than critical, but I believed them when I wrote 
them and that condition gives them whatever 
value they may now possess. They are, for- 
tunately, dated. In all these papers I have made 
omissions, altered words and phrases, added a 
few others, and appended footnotes. On the 
whole, however, I have left them as they were; 
they are, therefore, not to be regarded as re- 
written; they may be said to represent with some 
accuracy a phase and a period of my career which 
in all likelihood is at an end. 


New York. 
March 11, 1924. 


[xvii | 








Contents 


A VALEDICTORY 
WHY MUSIC IS UNPOPULAR 
THE GREAT AMERICAN COMPOSER 


' THE AUTHORITATIVE WORK ON AMERICAN 
MUSIC 


MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES 


THE IMPORTANCE OF ELECTRICAL PICTURE 
CONCERTS 


MOVIES FOR PROGRAM NOTES 
THE NEW ART OF THE SINGER 


VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY HAVELOCK 
ELLIS 


ON THE RELATIVE DIFFICULTIES OF DEPICT- 
ING HEAVEN AND HELL IN MUSIC 


ON THE REWRITING OF MASTERPIECES 


ON HEARING WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU 
WANT IT 


CORDITE FOR CONCERTS 


106 


Tec) 


195 





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Why Music is Unpopular 


Music criticism usually divides itself automat- 
ically into two classes. In the one, the critic, 
whose emotions have ostensibly been aroused by 
poems in tone, tries to render to the reader the 
intensity of his feelings by quoting from the 
word poets. ‘The first line of Endymion and pas- 
sages from Shakespeare fall athwart his pages. 
Scarcely a musical note but has its literary echo. 
The music of Maurice Ravel reminds this un- 
imaginative scribe of verses. from Arthur Rim- 
baud and Jules Laforgue; snippets and snatches 
from Keats and Wordsworth serve admirably to 
evoke the spirit of almost any composer; I have 
found Walt Whitman linked with Edward Mac- 
Dowell; Milton and Handel are occasionally 
made to seem to speak the same language; Byron 
and Tchaikovsky are asked to walk hand in 
hand. If you have never heard Beethoven's 
Seventh Symphony, it may afford you some small 
consolation to find it tied up in the reviewer's 
mind with something like this: 


“Come and trip it as you go 
On the light fantastic toe.” 


Ea 


Why Music is Unpopular 

It is quite likely, indeed, that an audience of silly 
maiden ladies in the middle west, unaccomplished 
in the skill of tones, hearing little music, applauds 
delightedly this soft sobbery. Two often appo- 
site lines, however, I have never come upon in 
music criticism. This, from W. B. Yeats’s King 
and No King, would certainly fit many a singer: 
‘Would it were anything but merely voice!” and 
sometimes, after a few days of shameless concert- 
going with a friend from out of town, I feel 
tempted to reassure him, Calibanwise: “Be not 
afeard; the isle is full of noises.”’ 

Our second critic approaches his task with 
more sobriety of expression. He believes it to 
be his bounden, and unenlivening, duty to avoid 
florid language in his dismal effort to impress his 
readers with the sublime seriousness of the art 
he so laboriously strives to hold within academ- 
ically prescribed limits. His erudite style bris- 
tles with adverbial clauses, with technical con- 
jurations, abjurations, and apostrophes. He 
summons the eleven dull devils of dusty knowl- 
edge to his aid in his consistent endeavour to be 
accurate and just. He never deals in metaphor, 
never in simile; no figures of speech whatever 
sully the dead drab of his columns; he would con- 
sider them, if he thought about the matter at all, 
cheapening influences, encroaching on the drowsy 
preserves of his somnolent profession. With 


[2] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 

as pedantic a gesture as he can command, and 
his talents in this direction are considerable, he 
lays out his weights and measures, always qualify- 
ing, almost always. Buts, ifs, and in spite ofs 
cumber his operose paragraphs. No music is 
perfect; none is imperfect. With this axiom, 
liberally disregarded by more lively writers, for 
a text, he proceeds to tell us that the allegro of 
the new fantasia is admirable in form, but that 
the themes, perhaps, do not justify such elaborate 
“treatment. He emphasizes history; he leans on 
handbooks; musty facts are dragged in pales- 
trically for their own sake alone. His manner 
is formidable, exegetical, eupeptic, adynamic, as- 
thenic. He clings to cliché: ‘The composi- 
tion smells of the midnight oil,” etc., etc. 

These two varieties of critics are only too ac- 
tually with us on every side, not only in New 
York and Boston, but in London, Paris, and Ber- 
lin as well. They always have been and they 
always will be with us. ‘They are one of the 
principal causes for the profound and unfortunate 
indifference, nay contempt, with which music (as 
an art) is regarded by the man who may take 
an enormous amount of pleasure out of reading 
books or looking at pictures. Instead of awaken- 
ing an interest in the greatest and most myste- 
rious of the arts, these obstinate fellows have 
acted as direct agents in the perpetuation of the 


[3] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 


bugaboos and voodoos of the academy, freely 
offering incense and the freshly slain sacrifices of 
baby composers to the false gods of their fathers. 
Often, indeed, their crime is feticide. Far from 
urging the layman to enter the sacred temples, 
rather they frighten him away. ‘“‘Come and 
listen”? is a phrase that is never on their lips, 
never flows from their pens. On the contrary, 
they write: ‘Turn about. I have spent my whole 
life, and I am an old man, trying to learn what you 
never can hope to know. Any pleasure you may 
derive from listening to music is a false pleasure, 
because it is not based on knowledge. Pleasure, 
indeed, is forbidden; the initiated do not enjoy 
themselves. Retreat, young man; go back to 
your books and pictures; the gods of music desire 
none such as you to draw near to their altars.” 
Instead, indeed, of sending the reader to the near- 
est concert hall, they have made him take an oath 
that never, if he knows it, will he voluntarily set 
foot in such a place. [am presupposing readers! 
The truth is that these men, after a time, are 
not even read, save by sopranos and fiddlers, and 
their early readers, sceptical thereafter regarding 
all literature devoted to a discussion of music, 
never again will peruse a line of what they have 
been led to consider, through these unfortunate 
examples, as hopeless drivel. ‘Thereby they shut 
themselves off, unwittingly, not only from further 


[4] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 
communion with music itself, but also from in- 
timacy with one of the most delightful sidetracks 
of the art of letters, for it cannot be denied that 
Berlioz and Ernest Newman and Ethel Smyth 
would amuse and interest even a_tone-deaf 
Methodist hardware importer. 

For there are other kinds of music critics, be- 
sides the two varieties which I have described. 
There is, for instance, the man who writes with 
a flourish, indulges in ‘“‘fine writing” and what is 
“precious,” and vocalizes with adjectives. You 
may not agree with his hyperbolical statement 
that Grieg and MacDowell were the foremost 
musicians of the nineteenth century, but you are 
interested in it because he means it and because 
he is not afraid to say so emphatically. ‘‘Per- 
haps,’ on occasion you whisper to yourself chas- 
teningly, “he is right. It may even be possible 
that Mendelssohn was greater than Beethoven.” 

Another reviewer slashes violently into some 
school or other; he drives his sword sharply into 
the heart of your pet theory, while valiantly de- 
fending as good a one of his own; he dips his pen 
in gall and guides it over paper soaked in worm- 
wood. He despises the new music, any new 
music, and he consumes nine thousand words in 
explaining why; he loathes the opera, and he 
throws all the weight of his influential opinion 
against it. [his man is readable and interesting. 


[5] 


Why Music is Unpopular 
His views assume importance even to the reader 
who does not agree with them, because they 
arouse curiosity. “Can the music of Schoenberg 
be as bad as all that?” you question yourself, and 
then decide, ‘“‘I must hear it and form my own 
opinion.” 

A third writer mingles anecdote with more 
pregnant matter; nothing is too trivial for his 
purpose, nothing too serious. He is accurate 
without being pedantic; he paints the human side 
of the art. He draws us nearer to composi- 
tions by discussing the composers. When he 
writes of a singer it is not as though he were de- 
scribing a vocal machine, emitting perfect and im- 
perfect notes; he pictures a human being apply- 
ing herself to her task; his account is vivid, 
humorous, sometimes a trifle malicious. He en- 
livens us and he awakens our interest. This is 
not altogether a matter of style; it is also a mat- 
ter of feeling. The style is perhaps the man. 

There are but two rules for the critic to follow: 
have something to say and say it as well as you 
know how; say it with charm or say it with force, 
but say it naturally; do not be afraid to say today 
what you may regret tomorrow; and, above all, 
do not befuddle and befog the mind of your 
reader by dragging in Shelley, Francis Thompson, 
William Blake, and Verlaine. If you can ac- 
tually suggest ideas to him by quoting from the 


[6] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 

poets, then by all means quote freely, but do not 
try to kindle in him the sensation caused by a 
hearing of César Franck’s D minor Symphony 
by printing copious excerpts from the published 
works of Swinburne and Mallarmé. Miusic crit- 
icism has two purposes, beyond the obvious and 
essential one that it provides a bad livelihood 
for the critic: the first, and perhaps the most im- 
portant, is to entertain the reader, because crit- 
icism, like any other form of literature, should 
stand by itself and not lean too heavily on the 
matter of which it treats; the second is to interest 
the reader in music, or in books about music, or 
even in musicians. Criticism can be informing 
without being pedantic; it can prod the pachy- 
dermatous hide of a conservative old fogy 
concert-goer without deviating from the facts. 
Above all else criticism should be an expression 
of personal feeling. Otherwise it has no value. 
“Whoever has been through the experience of 
discussing criticism with a thorough, perfect, and 
entire Ass,’ writes Bernard Shaw, ‘‘has been told 
that criticism should above all things be free from 
personal feeling.” 

On one occasion I experienced an irrepressible 
desire to rail against the intellectual snobbery 
which persuaded flaccid minds that the string 
quartet was the noblest musical art form and that 
the organizations which devoted themselves to 


L7] 


Why Music is Unpopular 

this fetish were archangelic interpreters of a 
heavenly song. I might have said: “The string 
quartet is an overrated art form. Certainly, 
Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms have poured 
some of their finest inspiration into this mould, 
some of their most musical feeling, and yet the 
nature of this music is such that its interpreters 
derive more pleasure from its performance than 
its auditors.” It is possible that these sentences 
might have been read, and if so, understood . . . 
and forgotten. If every time I expressed a per- 
sonal feeling, and all my feelings and tastes are 
intensely personal, I followed with something 
like this, “it seems to me,” or “this may or may 
not be true,”’ or ‘‘according to my taste,” or “Mr. 
Thing does not agree with me,” my utterances 
would lose whatever charm or force they possess, 
and they would be so clogged with extraneous 
qualifications that no one would think of reading 
them. ‘It is the fault of our rhetoric,’ Emerson 
once wrote, “that we cannot strongly state one 
fact without seeming to belie some other.” 
What I did say about string quartets provoked 
attention.! Philip Hale remarked that the 

1’The curious may discover what I did say by reading a paper 
entitled, Music for Museums. Initially printed in a now de- 
funct periodical of some parts, called Rogue (May 15, 1915), 
this paper later became the only section I can recall with any 


patience of a vile book (my first), Music After the Great War; 
G. Schirmer; 1915. I dare say some edition is still in print, 


[3] 


Why Music is Unpopular 
older lions roared and shook their manes because 
I had spoken disrespectfully of chamber music, 
which thus suffered along with the equator. Per- 
haps. However, a certain salutary disrespect for 
the snobbery of string quartet fanatics survived 
. also along with the equator. 

It is not necessary, gracious reader, that you 
should agree with the critic. You will satisfy no 
longing in the heart of the animal if you do agree 
with him, unless he be made of base metal. It 
will require only a little reading on your part to 
convince you that the critics themselves, especially 
the best and most interesting critics, do not agree. 
There exist no standards, it would seem, by which 
music can be assessed and judged with any degree 
of finality. Lawrence Gilman gives us plenty of 
evidence on this point,! if any were needed. He 
reminds us that John F. Runciman viewed Par- 
sifal with a contemptuous eye, calling the music 
‘decrepit stuff,” ‘‘the last sad quaverings of a 
beloved friend,” while Ernest Newman describes 
it as “in many ways the most wonderful and im- 
pressive thing ever done in music.’”’ Vernon 
Blackburn regarded Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius 
as the finest musical work since Wagner, but 
George Moore dismisses it briefly as “holy water 
in a German beer-barrel.”” HH. E. Krehbiel con- 


1In a paper called, Taste in Music, which appeared in The 
Musical Quarterly, January, 1917. 


[9] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 


siders Pelléas et Mélisande a score of which 
“nine-tenths is dreary monotony,” whereas Louis 
Laloy is stirred to reverence by contemplation 
of its beauty. Jean Marnold and H. T. Finck 
do not agree about Carmen, and W. J. Hender- 
son and James Huneker hold opposing opinions 
regarding the merits of Strauss’s Don Quixote. 

There are critics who accept Wagner whole: 
Rienzi, Lohengrin, Ring, and Parsifal; others 
find nothing to enjoy or praise in certain of his 
works and even discover tiresome passages in 
Die Walkire. Some critics profess to admire 
folksongs and folksong influences; others do not.. 
Many otherwise estimable men have been found 
who are willing to subscribe to an everlasting 
veneration for the music of Liszt, a fancy, even, 
for the compositions of Rubinstein. I have read 
in several newspapers and at least one magazine 
that Horatio Parker’s Mona was a valuable con- 
tribution to our national art. It is possible. 
When we are informed that Percy Grainger is a 
greater composer than Debussy we may be inter- 
ested, if we are interested in the manner of the 
telling, but we are not obliged to accept the state- 
ment as literally true. 

To be sure, the acknowledgment is pretty gen- 
eral that Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were 
great composers, but some critics insist that the 
musicians who imitate the forms and styles of 


[10] 


Why Music 1s Unpopular 

these masters today are great composers, a point 
of view which always awakens the murderous in- 
stinct within me, as it should be apparent to the 
veriest dolt that an artist in some way must reflect 
the spirit of his own epoch. Besides what one 
man has done naturally, another copies servilely 
and without reason. Bach employed the fugue 
because it was the natural form into which his 
ideas came to him. Subsequent composers, for 
the greater part, have used the fugue as an end 
in itself. 

There are a few delightful writers about music, 
and you will find that all of them, in one way or 
another, bear out the point of my remarks. 
There are too many others who are hedging the 
most universal of the arts away from the people 
to whom it belongs, protecting it with their damp 
vapourings, their vapid technicalities, their wor- 
ship of Clio, their stringent analyses, or, worse 
than anything else, their extensive explanations. 
Let each judge for himself, and let every one be 
encouraged to judge. Let more think about 
music; to make that possible, curiosity must be 
stimulated, so that there may be a more general 

1Le critique sceptique, toujours en défiance méme contre sa 
propre sensibilité, est mené par la peur d’étre dupe; il adopte 
volontiers le ton de V’ironie ou méme celui du badinage. II 
craint l’enthousiasme comme une maladie et se tire de toutes les 


diffcultés au moyen d’un sourire et parfois d’une grimace.” 
Remy de Gourmont: Promenades Littéraires; I, 70. 


[11] 


Why Music is Unpopular 

desire to hear music, especially new music. 
Books are on every hand; if one does not visit 
galleries, at least one cannot escape reproductions 
of good pictures in our periodicals and in the 
Sunday supplements of the newspapers, but to 
hear music (I am speaking, of course, of so- 
called “‘art music’) it is necessary to visit certain 
halls on certain days. ‘This requires encourage- 
ment because it also requires patience. Why, 
I have waited more than twelve years to hear 
Vincent d’Indy’s Istar only to discover that I have - 
heard it too late. The conductors of our con- 
certs make these matters difficult; do not let our 
critics make them more so. 

In the stricter interests of accuracy this paper, 
of course, should have been christened Some re- 
marks on one of the reasons for the comparative 
unpopularity of music as an art form, an exact 
description of its contents, but if I had called it 
that do you think you would have read it? 


March 1, 1917. 


[12] 


The Great American Composer 


When, a hundred years hence, some curious in- 
vestigator searches through the available archives 
in an attempt to discover what was the state of 
American music at the beginning of the twentieth 
century, do you fancy that he will take the trouble 
to exhume and dig into the ponderous scores of 
Henry Hadley, Arthur Foote, Ernest Schelling, 
George W. Chadwick, Horatio W. Parker, and 
the rest of the crew who are regarded with re- 
spect by contemporary critics? Will he hesitate 
ten minutes to peruse the scores of Mona, the 
Four Seasons Symphony, or The Pipe of Desire? 
A plethora of books and papers will cause him to 
wonder why so much pother was made about 
Edward MacDowell, and he will even shake his 
head a trifle wearily over the saccharine delights 
of The Rosary and Narcissus. But if he be 
lucky enough to come upon copies of Waiting for 
the Robert E. Lee, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, 
or Hello Frisco, which are generally regarded 
with horror by the music critics of our day, his 
face will light up and he will feel an emotion akin 


[13] 


The Great American Composer 


to that which Yvette Guilbert must have felt 
when she unearthed Le cycle du vin, or Le lien 
serré, or C’est le mai, and he will attempt to find 
out, probably in vain, something about the com- 
posers, Lewis F. Muir, Irving Berlin, and Louis 
A. Hirsch, the true grandfathers of the great 
American composer of the year 2001. 

There will be difficulties in his way. Nothing 
disappears so soon from the face of the earth as 
a very popular song. The music shops sell hun- 
dreds of thousands of copies before the demand 
suddenly ceases. Then, when no more copies are 
ordered from the publisher, he is likely to lose 
interest in a song which may occupy space that 
might be allotted to a newer tune, and he causes 
the destruction of the plates. As for the pur- 
chasers, on every moving day they consign their 
old popular songs to the dustheap. After the 
Ball makes way for Two Little Girls in Blue 
(or vice-versa; I really cannot be expected to re- 
member that far back). Try to buy After the 
Ball now and see if you can. Advertise for a 
copy and see if you can secure one. You will 
find it difficult, I imagine, and yet it was only as 
far back as 1892, or 1893, that everybody was 
singing this melancholy tale of the misadventures 
of a little girl in a big city. No doubt, at that 
period, kind old ladies stopped on the street to 


[14] 


The Great American Composer 


pat bleached blondes on the cheeks, with the re- 
flection, She may be somebody’s daughter. 

Music of that variety will not be sought after 
by collectors and prized and sung again, except to 
satisfy curiosity, or to “furnish innocent merri- 
ment.” ‘There will be those, no doubt, impelled 
to form a collection of the sentimentalities of the 
late nineteenth century, including therein the 
drawings of Howard Chandler Christy, which, in 
the year 2000, will be as rare as black hawthorn 
vases are today, and the novels of George Barr 
McCutcheon, a single copy of whose Nedra or 
Graustark may fetch the tidy sum of forty dollars 
in gold at some twenty-first century auction. 

The American sentimental song, however, has 
been largely obliterated by the best new music of 
the twentieth century, into which a new quality has 
crept, a quality which may serve to keep it alive, 
just as the coon songs which preceded it in the 
nineteenth century have been kept alive. Dixie 
and such solemn tunes as were created by Stephen 
C. Foster are not to be scoffed at. They are not 
scoffed at, as we very well know. ‘They are sung 
and played at the concerts given by sopranos and 
violinists like the folksongs of other nations. 
They are known all over the world. ‘They have 
found their way into serious compositions by 
celebrated composers. Even the cakewalks of a 


[15] 


The Great American Composer 


later date, The Georgia Campmeeting,! Whis- 
tling Rufus, Hello, Ma Baby, and the works of 
Williams and Walker (curiously enough, the best 
ragtime has not been written by Negroes, al- 
though Under the Bamboo Tree and the extraor- 
dinary At the Ball are the creations of black 
men) have their value, but ragtime, as it exists 
today, had not been invented in the nineties. 
The apotheosis of syncopation had not begun. 
Not that syncopation is new in music. Nearly 
the whole of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is 
based on it. Schumann scarcely wrote two con- 
secutive bars which are not syncopated. But 
ragtime syncopation is different. Louis A. 
Hirsch once pointed out to me what he considered 
its distinctive feature. “The melody and har- 
mony are syncopated separately,’ ? was his ex- 
planation and it will have to suffice, in spite of 
the fact that the same thing is true of the prelude 
to Parsifal, in which the conductor is forced to 
beat 6—4 time with one hand and 4-4 with the 
other, and of certain Spanish dances, in which 
singer, guitarist, dancer, and public vie with one 

1 Which obviously inspired Debussy’s Golliwogg’s Cakewalk. 

2He added, further: “In ragtime the syncopation may occur 
at a different beat in each bar. It is unexpected.” It should 
also be stated that there is usually a curiously exact relationship 
between the syncopation in the music and that in the words. 


Modern jazz, a later development of this type of music, has 
further added a novel colour interest. 


[16] 


The Great American Composer 


another to produce a bewildering complexity of 
rhythm. ‘There is abundance of syncopation and 
the most esoteric rhythmic intricacy in Igor Stra- 
vinsky’s ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (on certain 
pages of this ballet the time-signature changes 
with every bar), but ragtime is not the word to 
describe that vivid score, nor is it likely that any 
one can find much resemblance between Every- 
body’s Doing It or Ragging the Scale and the 
jota or the prelude to Parsifal. 

Regard, for example, the form of Waiting for 
the Robert E. Lee. A writer in the London 
Times calls attention to the fact that, although 
for convenience it is written out in a rhythm of 
8, it is really a rhythm of 3, followed by a rhythm 
of 5, proceeding without warning, occasionally, 
into the normal rhythm of 8. It is impossible 
for many trained singers to read ragtime at all. 
They can decipher the notes, but they do not 
understand the conventions observed by the com- 
posers in setting these notes on paper, conven- 

1 European orchestras find the same difficulty. It is seldom 
that any tune of this character is ever properly performed as 
regards rhythm and tone-colour by any band in London, Paris, 
or Berlin, unless that band be American. ‘This is partly due to 
the fact, doubtless, that ragtime and jazz composers are seldom 
trained musicians, so that their ideas created at the piano are 
incorrectly transcribed by alien pens, but more, perhaps, to the 
fact that there are certain subtleties inherent in the authentic 


performance of this music which cannot be set down in any 
current form of notation. 
L17] 


The Great American Composer 


tions which are the A B C’s of every cabaret 
performer. 

There is current an absurd theory to the effect 
that the test of good music is whether you tire 
of itor not. If I were to be permitted to apply 
this test I would say frankly that I no longer 
consider Die Walkiire and Beethoven's Fifth 
Symphony good music. It is just as well to re- 
member that if we heard the “‘classic’’ composers 
exploited by every street organ and cabaret 
pianist their music would soon become as intol- 
erable as Pretty Baby has become during the sum- 
mer just past. Probably a great many people 
are weary of listening to Die Wacht am Rhein, 
but that does not prove that it is not a good tune. 

The creations of our best composers have been 
highly appreciated abroad. Stravinsky collects 
examples of them with assiduity and intends to 
use them in some of his forthcoming works,* 
just as he has utilized French and Russian pop- 
ular songs in The Firebird and Petrouchka. 
Popular songs, indeed, form as good a basis for 
a serious composer to work upon as folksongs. 
This is a remark I have been intending to make 
for some time and it will do no harm to make it 

1JIn 1919 Stravinsky composed his Piano Ragtime and his 
Ragtime for orchestra (violins, viola, double-bass, flute, clarinet, 


horn, cornet, trombone, percussion instruments and cymbalo. 
This work was performed in London, under the direction of 


Arthur Bliss, in 1920. 
[18] 


The Great American Composer 


emphatically. Examine, for example, the songs 
in the repertory of Yvette Guilbert; some are 
folksongs and some are not. I defy any one 
outside of Julien Tiersot, Professor Jean Beck, 
H. E. Krehbiel, and one or two others, to tell 
you which is which. ‘These men, being tolerably 
familiar with the available collections of French 
folksongs, take it for granted, when they hear 
Mme. Guilbert sing a melody strange to them, 
that it must have had a composer. ‘There seems 
to be no other known method for distinguishing 
between a folksong and a popular tune of the 
same epoch. A folksong, according to some 
authorities, is a song which has no composer; it 
just grows. Some one sings it one day in the 
fields, some one else adds to it, and, finally, there 
it is before your ears, a song known all over the 
country-side, but no one knows who started it 
rolling.t Swing low, sweet chariot is alleged 
to be such a folksong; it is an extremely good 

1I may be permitted to state that I do not subscribe to this 
absurd theory, which, dictated and thundered forth by certain 
academicians, was allowed for a time to pass unchallenged. 
Later authorities do not accept this view. Note, for example, 
what J. S. Curwen has to say in his preface to Folksongs of 
Many Lands: “I have waded through a great many prefaces 
to collections of French, German, Scandinavian, and other folk- 
songs, but have never found a statement of the ‘evolved’ origin 
of the folksong such is upheld at the present time (1911) by 


some collectors in England. ... Of one thing I am sure. The 
charming melodies in this book, full of formal beauty, of daintily- 


[19] 


The Great American Composer 


example of a tune without a known composer, 
and it has been quoted with effect in Dvorak’s 
symphony, From the New World.  Finicull’ 
Funicula’ is not a folksong.t It is a popular 
Neapolitan song, composed by Denza to cel- 
ebrate the funicular railway at Naples. Never- 
theless, Richard Strauss himself quoted it bodily 
in his symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, although, 
to be sure, he laboured under the impression at 
the time that it was a folksong. In a similar 
fashion an American tune, It looks to me like 
a big night tonight, found its way into Elektra. 
This may have been unconscious assimilation on 
the part of Strauss; at any rate it is interesting 
to note how a vulgar air has been transformed 
into the beautiful theme—one of the most ex- 
pressive in this music drama—of the Children of 
curved tonal lines, of haunting rhythms and cadences that carry 
forward the interest, are the work of men and women, who, 
whether they knew the fact or not, were artists. These tunes 
were composed for the people, not by the people. The idea that 
from an amorphous condition these melodies were gradually 
moulded into shape by being handed from one untutored singer 
to another is to me unthinkable. Popular use deteriorates 
melodies; it does not shape them.” For an extended discussion 
of the whole matter from this point of view, see Francis Clarke’s 
paper: Beastly Tunes; The London Mercury; III, 510. My 
own definition of a folksong would be that it is a popular 
song, of which the name of the composer has been forgotten. 


1 Most popular Neapolitan songs, such as O Sole Mio, Santa 
Lucia, and Maria, Mari, are not folksongs in the academic sense 


of the word. 
[20] 


? 


The Great American Composer 


Agamemnon. When Paul Dukas’s lyric drama, 
Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, was produced at the 
Metropolitan Opera House, the reviewers, al- 
most to a man, referred to the song of the wives, 
which floats out of the cellar of the castle when 
Ariane opens the forbidden door in the first act, 
as a Brittany folksong. So it may very well be; 
I believe, indeed, that Dukas has said that it was. 
However, I am informed on excellent authority 
that he composed it himself! It has, to be sure, 
a folksong air, and it is interesting to catch its 
resemblance to the Berceuse of the Princess of 
the Sea in Rimsky-Korsakoft’s opera, Sadko, and 
to the old Spanish tune, known to us as Flee 
as a Bird. La jambe de bois, borrowed by 
Stravinsky for an effect in the first scene of 
'Petrouchka, might be a folksong, but it is not. 
It is a popular French air. ‘‘When Elgar used 
a genuine Welsh folksong in his Introduction and 
Allegro for Strings, a well-known London critic, 
a prominent member of the Folksong Society, de- 
clared it to be a poor imitation of the folk-style,” 
writes Ernest Newman. ‘When the legend got 
about that a certain melody in In the South was 
an Italian folksong, the same critic recognized the 
genuine folk-quality in it, and it was distinctly un- 
fortunate for him that the melody happened to 
be Elgar’s own invention from first to last.” 
Thus it happens that while many composers, 


[ar | 


The Great American Composer 


even such celebrated men, in their day, as Raff, 
Rubinstein, Gade, and Mendelssohn, swiftly drop 
into oblivion, the composer of a good popular 
song is assured of immortality, as such things go. 
His song may be sung a century, indeed, after his 
name is forgotten. Sometimes, by a strange fa- 
tality, even his name may be remembered, along 
with his music. It must be apparent to any one 
that The Old Folks at Home, Dixie, My Old 
Kentucky Home, and Old Black Joe are better 
known and more admired today than the operas 
of Meyerbeer. 

It is my opinion that the best contemporary 
American composers (I am still referring to Irv- 
ing Berlin, Louis Hirsch, and others of their 
kind)? have brought a new quality into music, a 
spirit analogous to that to be found in the best 

1These names seem almost classic now. Many new names 
should be added; among others, certainly that of George 
Gershwin, whose I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, obviously 
inspired by the manner of Negro spirituals, I must consider the 
most perfect piece of jazz yet written; Zez Confrey, with his 
diverting and ingenious Kitten on the Keys; Abel Baer, with 
his Mama Loves Papa; Walter Donaldson, with Carolina in the 
Morning. On November 1, 1923, at a concert in /Kolian Hall, 
New York, Eva Gauthier sang a group of these songs. Their 
position on the program stood between a group by Bela Bartok 
and Paul Hindemuth and an air from Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. 
The group included Irving Berlin’s masterpiece, Alexander’s 
Ragtime Band, Jerome Kern’s The Siren’s Song, Walter 


Donaldson’s Carolina in the Morning, and George Gershwin’s 
Pll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Swanee, and Innocent In- 


[22] 


The Great American Composer 


folk-dances of Spain, in Gipsy, Hungarian and 
Russian popular music, and an entirely novel 
form. They have, to be sure, been working for 
a livelihood, but in that respect they have only 
followed the excellent precedent established by 
Offenbach, Richard Strauss, and Puccini. Ber- 
nard Shaw has probably made a great deal more 
money than Henry Arthur Jones, but no one 
thinks of calling him less of an artist than Mr. 
Jones for that reason. Zuloaga sells his por- 
traits at very high rates; is he therefore to be 
considered less seriously than a portrait-painter 
in Greenwich Village who gives his canvases 


genue Baby. For an encore, Mme. Gauthier added Gershwin’s 
Do It Again. Gershwin himself played very brilliant accom- 
paniments for these songs. I think, speaking historically, that 
this was the first time in America that a singer had included 
modern jazz numbers in a serious recital program. It is pos- 
sible, however, that it had been done before in Paris. Paul 
Whiteman, too, has made a serious effort to glorify jazz. He 
was one of the first to perceive the advantage of arranging these 
numbers with symphonic scoring, making the most, as well, of 
effects peculiar to the jazz orchestra, such as covering the bell 
of a cornet with a hat, or augmenting the sound of a trumpet 
with a megaphone. Whiteman’s orchestra, unlike most jazz 
bands, plays from score and does not depend on improvisation 
for its results. Even the paltriest tune, orchestrated by Ferdie 
Grofé, with infinite ingenuity and a profusion of novel colour 
and harmonic effects, and performed with the precision and 
beautiful tone quality possessed by this band, and with the fire 
put into it by their inspired leader, becomes important enough 
to listen to with pleasure. The brasses and woodwinds in this 
band are superior to those in any other orchestra with which 


[23 | 


The Great American Composer 


away? There does not appear to exist, indeed, 
any particular reason why an artist should not 
be permitted to make money if he be able to do 
so. It is the nature of some artists to shy at the 
annoyances and complications of business. ‘The 
work of others, Stéphane Mallarmé, Monticelli, 
Robert Franz, is antipathetic to the crowd and 
always will be. Many of the greatest artists, 
however, have made the widest appeal (I might 
mention Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarroti, 
and Tolstoy), and some few men of this stamp 
have been able to transform their inspirations 
into gold. In the circumstances, it seems unfair 
to speak derogatively of Irving Berlin merely 
because he happens to make money. 

The most obvious point of superiority of our 
ragtime composers, overlooking, for the moment, 
the fact that their music is pleasanter to listen 
to, over Messrs. Parker, Chadwick, and Hadley, 
is that they are expressing the very soul of a 
nation and an epoch, while their more serious 


I am acquainted, and the ability of several of its members to 
play a variety of instruments makes it possible to obtain a 
profusion of varied colour combinations with a modest per- 
sonnel. The unusually gifted Ross Gorman alone is equally 
proficient on E flat and B flat soprano saxophones, E flat alto 
saxophone, oboe and bass oboe, heckelphone, E flat and B flat 
alto and bass clarinets, and octavion. Others in the band are 
nearly as versatile. The skilful employment of piano and 
banjo in these orchestrations is also to be noted. 


124] 


The Great American Composer 


confréres are struggling to pour into the forms 
of the past the thoughts of the past, rearranged, 
to be sure, but without notable inspiration. 
They have nothing new to say, and no particular 
reason for saying it. Louis Hirsch once told me 
of a conversation he had overheard at Rafael 
Joseffy’s: A new pupil entered and proceeded to 
play for the master. Joseffy interrupted her. 
“You are not playing the right notes,” he said. 
“I’m sure that I am,” she replied. ‘Begin once 
more.” She did so. Joseffy interrupted her 
again: ‘“That’s wrong. It isn’t written like 
that.” “But it is. Won’t you look at it, 
please?’ After examining the score the mas- 
ter apologized: ‘‘O, it’s something of Mac- 
Dowell’s. I thought you were trying to play a 
transcription of the Tristan prelude.” ‘‘I have 
remarked,” writes Turgeniev, in one of his let- 
ters to Pauline Viardot, “that in imitative work 
the most spirituelles are precisely the most de- 
testable when they take themselves seriously. A 
sot copies servilely; a man of spirit without talent 
imitates pretentiously and with an effort, with the 
worst of all efforts, with that of wishing to be 
original.” 

It is only through the trenchant pens of our 
new composers that the complicated vigour of 
American life has been expressed in tone. It is 
the only music created in America today which is 


[25] 


The Great American Composer 


worth the paper on which it is written. It is the 
only American music which is enjoyed by the 
nation (even lovers of Mozart and Debussy pre- 
fer ragtime to the inert and saponaceous clas- 
sicism of our more serious-minded composers) ; 
it is the only American music which is heard 
abroad (and it is heard everywhere, in the 
trenches by way of the victrola, in the Café de 
Paris at Monte Carlo, in Cairo, in India, and in 
Australia) ; and it is the only music on which the 
musicians of our land can build in the future. 
If it be urged against it that it is a hybrid product, 
depending upon Negro and Spanish rhythms, at 
least the same objection can be urged against 
Spanish music itself, which has emerged from the 
music of the Moors and the Arabs; Havelock 
Ellis even detects Greek and Egyptian influences. 

If the American composers with (what they 
consider) more serious aims, instead of writing 
symphonies or other tattered and exhausted 
forms which belong to another age of compo- 
sition, would strive to put into their music the 
rhythms and tunes that dominate the hearts of 
the people, a new form would evolve which might 
prove to be the child of the Great American 
Composer we have all been waiting for so long 
and so anxiously. I do not mean to suggest 


1 Henry F. Gilbert has composed a set of American Dances 
in ragtime rhythm, besides his ballet, The Dance in Place 


[26] 


The Great American Composer 


that Edgar Stillman Kelley should write vari- 
ations on the theme of O, You Beautiful Doll! or 
that Arthur Farwell should compose a symphony 
utilizing The Gaby Glide for the first subject of 
the allegro and Everybody’s Doing It for the 
second, with the adagio based on Pretty Baby in 
aminor key. It is not my intention to encourage 
some one to write a tone-poem called New York, 
in which all these songs and ten or fifteen more 
should be thematically bundled together and 
finally wrapped in the profundities of a fugue. 
But if a composer, bearing the spirit and rhythm 


Congo, Humoresque on Negro Minstrel Tunes, Negro Rhapsody, 
and Comedy Overture on Negro Themes. For such of this 
music as I have heard I can confess to no warm regard. John 
Powell’s Rhapsodie Négre for piano and orchestra and John 
Alden Carpenter’s Krazy Kat jazz pantomime are better, but 
since hearing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, performed 
by the composer for the first time at Paul Whiteman’s concert of 
American music at A£olian Hall on February 12, 1924, I am 
convinced that the best serious music along these lines will be 
written by the jazz composers themselves. Gershwin is a 
composer of popular hits, but unlike the greater number of his 
confréres, he is also an expert musician. The Rhapsody in 
Blue, constructed on the formula of a Liszt piano concerto, is 
not novel in form, but it is entirely novel in content. Gershwin 
has built up the entire composition, even to the adagio and the 
cadenzas, on jazz themes, treated symphonically, with working- 
out sections, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the sonata 
form. ‘The themes are both highly original and highly typical. 
At least two of them are as good as any that Richard Strauss 
ever thought of. The orchestration (indicated by the com- 
poser but carried out by Ferdie Grofé) utilizes all the novel and 


[27] 


The Great American Composer 


and dynamics and clang-tints of this music in 
mind, will permit his inspiration to run riot, it will 
be quite unnecessary for him to quote or to pour 
his thought into the mould of the symphony or 
the string quartet or any other defunct form. 
The idea, manifestly based though it.may be on 
the work of Irving Berlin and Louis Hirsch, will 
express itself in some new way. Percy Aldridge 
Grainger, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie are all 
working along these lines, to express modernity 
in tone, allowing the forms to create themselves, 
but, alas, none of these men is an American. 
Americans are inclined to look everywhere but 
under their noses for art. It never occurs to 
them that any object which has any relation with 
their every-day life has anything to do with 
beauty. Probably the Athenians behaved in a 
similar fashion. When some stranger admired 
the classic pile on the Acropolis, the Greeks, it 
is safe to guess, turned up their noses with the 
scornful remark, “O, that old thing! That’s the 
Parthenon; it’s been there for ages.” It will be 
remembered that Mytyl and Tyltyl, in The Blue- 
bird, spent considerable time and covered a good 
deal of ground in their search for that rare or- 
beautiful tonal effects that have been invented by jazz bands. 
To my mind, indeed, this composition (I have heard it four 
times) is the best serious work yet created by an American 


musician, and, aside from its form, it is, indubitably, thoroughly 
American. It is now available on a phonograph record. 


[28] 


The Great American Composer 


nithological symbol, only to discover that it had 
existed all the time at home, the last place in 
the world they had thought to look for it. Our 
Woolworth and Flatiron Buildings we are likely 
to ignore, while we bow the knee before the 
Chateau district of Fifth Avenue and our ridic- 
ulous Public Library. Chateaux are all very well 
on the Loire, but imitations of them have no 
place in New York. As for that absurd Roman 
Library! The present building, years in course 
of construction, has already practically outgrown 
its space, and it is not yet a decade since it was 
first opened to the public. Acres have been 
wasted in the corridors alone. Of course, a 
library in New York should shoot up forty storeys 
towards the sky. Speeding elevators should 
hoist the student in a jiffy to whatever mental 
stimulation he requires. R. J. Coady, in an 
amusing magazine called The Soil,! has sung the 
praises of American machinery, and his illustra- 
tions exhibit these steel works of art, of the best 
kind since they are also utilitarian. One day 
Mina Loy picked up one of those pasteboard 
folders to which matches are attached, which are 
given away at all cigar counters for the use of 
patrons. ‘Some day,” she said, “these will be 
very rare and then they will be considered beau- 
tiful.” She was quite right. A few years after 


1 Now defunct. Five numbers were published in 1916-17. 


[29] 


The Great American Composer 


we discover how to light our cigarettes with our 
personal magnetism, or perhaps stop smoking 
altogether, such a contrivance will naturally 
assume an interest for curious collectors and 
thereby become automatically as diverting an ob- 
ject for a cabinet as a Japanese scent-bottle or 
a specimen of Capo di Monte porcelain. The 
Baron de Meyer has found it amusing to decorate 
rooms with Victorian atrocities, such as baskets 
of shells and antimacassars, the sort of thing that 
went with black-walnut whatnots, knitted fire- 
screens, and Rogers groups in the days, not so 
long ago, when Godey’s Lady’s Book reposed on 
the centre table near the family Bible. 

In his essay on The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son found occasion to remark: ‘We have yet 
had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, 
which knew the value of our incomparable ma- 
terials, and saw, in the barbarism and material- 
ism of the times, another carnival of the same 
gods whose picture he so much admires in 
Homer; then in the Middie Age; then in Cal- 
vinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and 
caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat 
and dull to dull people, but rest on the same 
foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and 
the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing 
away.” The poet, the novelist, in America, — 
since Emerson’s time, are at last aware of the 


[30] 


The Great American Composer 


value of this contemporary material. ‘The 
musician, aside from the popular composer, is 
not, and we have not learned to appreciate 
the popular composer. It is apparently impos- 
sible to consider anything art which is con- 
stantly buzzing in our ears. It would be absurd, 
we think, to consider it as art, because it is so 
commonplace. One might as easily consider the 
Woolworth Building or the Manhattan Bridge or 
the Pennsylvania Station works of art, and how 
could any one possibly do that? Just the same, 
I am inclined to believe that the Pennsylvania 
Station, the Manhattan Bridge, and that ‘‘roar- 
ing, epic ragtime tune,’ Waiting for the Robert 
FE. Lee are among the first twenty-four beautiful 
things created in America. It is no more use 
to imitate French or German music than it is to 
imitate French or German architecture. The 
sooner we realize this the better for all of us. 


January 23, 1917. 


[31] 


The Authoritative Work on Amer- 


ican Music 


In his most earnest and persuasive manner, 
H. L. Mencken recently pointed out to me that 
it was my duty to write a book about the Amer- 
ican composers, exposing their futile pretensions 
and describing their flaccid opera bar by bar. 
It was in vain that I urged that this would be 
but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not 
fight men of straw, that these our composers had 
no real standing in the concert halls, and that 
pushing them over would be an easy exercise for 
a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, 
they belonged to the academies; a great many per- 
sons believed they were important; it was neces- 
sary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with a 
not too heavily assumed humility, that I had al- 
ready done something of the kind in a paper en- 
titled The Great American Composer. “A good 
beginning,” asserted Colonel Mencken, ‘‘but not 
long enough. I won’t be satisfied with anything 
less than a book.” “But if I write a book about 
Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the 
others, I could find nothing new to say of each 


[32] 


on American Music 


of them; they are all alike. Neither their lives 
nor their music offer opportunities for varia- 
tions.’ “An excellent idea!’ cried Major 
Mencken, enthusiastically. ‘‘Write one chapter 
and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, 
changing only the name of the principal char- 
acter. [hen clap on a preface to explain your 
reason for this justifiable procedure.” My last 
protest was the feeblest of all: ‘I can’t spend 
a year or a month or a week poring over the 
scores of these fellows; I can’t go to concerts to 
hear their music. I might as well go to work in 
a coal mine.” “I'll do it for you!” triumphantly 
checkmated General Mencken. “I’ll read the 
scores and you shall write the book.’’ And so 
he left me, as on a similar occasion the fiend, 
having exhibited his prospectus, vanished from 
the vision of our Lord, and I returned to my 
garret sorely troubled, finding that the words of 
the man were running about in my head like so 
many little Japanese waltzing mice. 

After much cogitation, I examined my book- 
shelves until I discovered a very large red tome 
written by Louis Charles Elson; then I searched 
until I found another by Rupert Hughes, and, 
sitting down, perused these to see if their words 
of praise for our weak musical brothers would 
stir me to operate. ‘They did not. My heart 
action remained normal; no film formed over my 


[33] 


The Authoritative Work 


eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. I 
was able to read, indeed, quite calmly, in Mr. 
Hughes’s American Composers, that A. J. Good- 
rich is ‘‘recognized among scholars abroad as one 
of the leading spirits of our time;” that ‘(Henry 
Holden) Huss has ransacked the piano and pil- 
laged almost every imaginable fabric of high 
colour. . . . The result is gorgeous and purple;” 
that ‘‘The thing we are all waiting for is that 
American grand opera, A Woman of Marble- 
head (by Louis Adolphe Coerne). It is pre- 
dicted that it will not receive the marble heart;”’ 
that “I know of no modern composer who has 
come nearer to relighting the fires that burn in 
the old gavottes and fugues and preludes (than 
Arthur Foote). His two gavottes are to me 
away the best since Bach;” that ‘‘the song (Isra- 
fel by Edgar Stillman Kelley) is in my fervent 
belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of 
the very greatest lyrics in the world’s music;” 
and, in The History of American Music by Louis 
C. Elson, that ‘““Music has made even more rapid 
strides than literature among us,” and that 
“(George W. Chadwick) has reconciled the sym- 
metrical (sonata) form with modern passion.” 
In the fourth volume! of The Art of Music, 
published by the National Society of Music, I 
found still more encomiums for our composers. 


1 Edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby. 


[34] 


on American Music 


Therein I read with a sort of awed astonishment 
that one of the songs of Frederic Ayres ‘‘reveals 
a poignancy of imagination and a perception and 
apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any 
composer.” I learned that T. Carl Whitmer 
has a “spiritual kinship” with Arthur Shepherd, 
Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d’Indy. His music 
is ‘‘psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied; 
in colour it corresponds to the violet end of the 
spectrum.” Before he became acquainted with 
the later French idiom, Harvey W. Loomis 
“spontaneously breathed forth the quality of 
spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a 
Ravel.” I flipped the pages until I came to the 
name of Miss Gena Branscombe: ‘“Inexhaust- 
ible buoyancy, a superlative emotional wealth, 
and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are 
the qualities which have shaped the composer’s 
musical personality (it might also be said with- 
out fear of contradiction that these are the qual- 
ities that shaped Beethoven’s musical person- 
ality). . . . Her impatient melodies leap and 
dash with youthful life, while her accompani- 
ments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes.” 

Curiously enough, however, these statements 
did not annoy me. I found no desire arising in 
me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap 
with a guilty conscience, I should have ditched 
the undertaking, consigned it to that heap of 


[35] 


The Authoritative Work 


undone duties, where already lie notes on a com- 
parison of Andalusian mules with the mules of 
Liane de Pougy, a few scribbled memoranda for 
a treatise on the love habits of the mole, and a 
half-finished biography of the talented gentleman 
who signed his works Nick Carter, if my by this 
time quite roving eye had not alighted, entirely 
fortuitously, on one of the forgotten glories of 
my library, a slender volume entitled Popular 
American Composers. 

I recalled how I had come by this book. Hap- 
pening into a modest second-hand bookshop on 
lower Third Avenue, maintained chiefly for the 
laudable purpose of redistributing paper novels 
of the Seaside and kindred libraries, of which, 
alas, we hear very little nowadays, I asked the 
proprietor if, by chance, he possessed any lit- 
erature pertaining to the art of music. By way 
of reply, he retired to the rear of his little room, 
searched for a space in a litter on the floor, and 
then returned with a pile of nine volumes or so 
in his arms. The other titles, such as Great 
Violinists, Harmony in Thirteen Lessons, and 
How to Sing, did not interest me, but, in idly 
turning the pages of this Popular American Com- 
posers, I came across a half-tone reproduction 
of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less 
celebrated brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a 
short biography of the composer of On the Banks 


[36] 


on American Music 


of the Wabash. As Sir George Grove neglected 
to mention this portentous name in American art 
in his excellent dictionary (notwithstanding the 
fact that he devoted sixty-seven pages, printed in 
double columns, to Mendelssohn), I saw the ad- 
vantage of adding the little book to my collec- 
tion. ‘The dealer, when questioned, offered to 
part with the volume for a total of fifteen cents. 
Once I had become more thoroughly acquainted 
with its pages I realized that I would willingly 
have paid fifteen dollars for it. 

This book, indeed, cannot fail to delight Doc- 
tor Mencken. There is no reference in its pages 
to Edgar Stillman Kelley, Miss Gena Brans- 
combe, Louis Adolphe Coerne, Henry Holden 
Huss, IT. Carl Whitmer, Arthur Farwell, Arthur 
Foote, or A. J. Goodrich. In fact, if we over- 
look brief notices of John Philip Sousa, Harry 
von Tilzer, Paul Dresser, Charles K. Harris, and 
Hattie Starr (whom you will immediately recall 
as the composer of Little Alabama Coon), it 
may be stated categorically that the author, 
Frank L. Boyden, has not hesitated to go to the 
roots of his subject, brushing aside the music 
critics and their dicta, and has turned his atten- 
tion to figures in the art life of America from 
whom Mencken himself, I feel sure, would not 
take a single paragraph of praise, so richly is it 
deserved. I am unfamiliar with the causes con- 


[37] 


The Authoritative Work 


tributing to the book’s obscurity; perhaps, in- 
deed, they are akin to those responsible for the 
early failure of Sister Carrie. May we not even 
suspect that the odium cast by the Doubledays on 
the author of that romance was, quite possibly, 
actively transferred in some degree to a work 
which contained a biographical notice and a pic- 
ture of his brother? However that may be, 
Popular American Composers, published in 1902, 
has fallen into undeserved oblivion, and so | 
make no apology for inviting my readers to pe- 
ruse its pages with me. 

Opening the book then, at random, I discover 
on page 96 a biography of Lottie A. Kellow (the 
lady’s photograph graces the reverse of this 
page). Ina few, well-chosen words, almost, in- 
deed, in gipsy phrases, Mr. Boyden gives us the 
salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a 
resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, 
and the possessor of a contralto voice of great 
volume. As a composer she has to her credit 
‘marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other 
styles of instrumental music.’ We are offered a 
picture of Mrs. Kellow at work: ‘Mrs. Kel- 
low’s best efforts are made in the evening, and in 
darkness, save the light of the moonbeams on 
the keys of her piano.” We are also assured 
that ‘‘she is happy in her inspirations and a sin- 
cere lover of music. All of her compositions 


[38] 


on American Music 


show a decided talent and possess musical ele- 
ments which are only to be found in the works 
of an artist. Mrs. Kellow’s musical friends are 
confident of her success as a composer and pre- 
dict for her a brilliant future.” 

Let us turn to the somewhat more extensive 
biography of W. T. Mullin on Page 41 (Mr. 
Mullin’s photograph faces this page). Almost 
in the first line the author rewards our attention: 
‘To him may be applied the simplest and grand- 
est eulogy Shakespeare ever pronounced: ‘He 
wasaman.”’ Weare also informed that he was 
born of a cultured family, that his inherited no- 
bility of character has been carefully fostered by 
a thorough education, and told that one finds in 
him the unusual combination of genius wedded 
to sound common sense and practical business 
capacity. His family moved to Colorado, 
Texas, while he was still a lad, and here his 
musical talent began to bud. ‘‘The inventive 
faculties of the small boy and the innate har- 
mony of the musician combined to improvise a 
crude instrument which emitted the notes of the 
scale. Successful at drawing forth a concord of 
sweet sounds, he continued to experiment upon 
everything which would emit musical vibrations 
(even the pigs, I take it, did not escape). He 
consequently discovered the laws of vibrating 
chords before he had mastered the intricacies of 


[39] 


The Authoritative Work 


the multiplication table. Yet, strange as it may 
seem, his musical education was neglected. A 
four months’ course in piano instruction was 
interrupted and then resumed for two months 
more. Upon this meagre foundation rested his 
subsequent phenomenal progress.’’ I pause to 
remind the astonished and breathless reader 
that even Mozart and Schubert, infant prodigies 
that they were, received more training than this. 
I continue to quote: ‘At the age of thirteen 
he joined the Colorado (Texas) Cornet Band 
as a charter member. ‘The youngest member of 
the band, he soon outstripped his comrades by 
virtue of his superior natural ability. His posi- 
tion was that of second tenor. Wearying of the 
monotony of playing, he determined to venture 
on solo work. ‘The boy felt the impetus of rest- 
less power and the following incident illustrates 
his remarkable originality. Taking the piano 
score of a favourite melody, he transposed it 
within the compass of the second tenor. ‘This 
feat evoked admiring applause because of his ex- 
treme youth and untrained abilities. ‘The band- 
master remarked that elderly and experienced 
heads could hardly have accomplished this. 
‘From boyhood to manhood he has remained 
with the Colorado (Texas) Band as one of its 
most efficient members, composing in his leisure 


[ 40 | 


on American Music 


moments, marches, ragtime, waltzes, song and 
dance schottisches, etc. Of his many meritorious 
compositions only one has so far been given to the 
public: The West Texas Fair March, composed 
for and dedicated to the management of the West 
Texas Fair and Round-up. This institution 
holds its annual meetings at Abilene, Texas. 
There the march was played for the first time at 
their October 1899 meet with great success, and 
again at their September 1900 meet by the Stock- 
man Band of Colorado, Texas, which has fur- 
nished music for the West Texas Fair during their 
1899 and 1900 meetings. Mr. Mullin’s position 
in the Stockman Band is that of euphonium soloist. 
He is a proficient performer upon all band in- 
struments from cornet to tuba, including slide 
trombone, his favourites being the baritone and 
the trombone. 

‘He plays many stringed instruments, as well 
as the piano and organ. He is the proud pos- 
sessor of a genuine Stradivarius violin—a family 
heirloom—which he naturally prizes beyond the 
intrinsic value. The feat of playing on several 
instruments at once presents no difficulty to him. 

‘This briefly sketches Mr. Mullin’s life, char- 
acter, and ability as a musician. His accompany- 
ing photograph reveals his superb physique. 
Personally he possesses charming, agreeable man- 


[41] 


The Authoritative Work 


ners and Chesterfieldan courteousness, which 
vastly contributes to his popularity. Sincere de- 
votion to his art has been rewarded by that 
elevating nobility of soul, which alone can pen- 
etrate the blue expanse of space and revel in the 
music of the spheres.”’ 

What more is there to say? I can only assure 
the reader that Mullin stands unique among all 
musicians, creative and interpretative, in being 
able to play the organ, many stringed instru- 
ments, and all the instruments in a brass band, 
several of them simultaneously (it would be in- 
teresting to learn which and how), after studying 
the piano for six months. I sincerely hope that 
the error he made in withholding all his com- 
positions, save one, from the public, has been 
rectified. 

Helen Kelsey Fox, like so many of our other 
talented men and women, has a European strain 
in her blood. On her mother’s side she is a 
lineal descendant of a French nobleman and a 
German princess. Nevertheless, she continues to 
reside in Vermilion, Ohio. She is of a “‘decided 
poetic nature and lives in an atmosphere of her 
own. She dwells in a world of thought peopled 
by the creations of an active and lyric mentality.” 
She is so imbued with the poetic spark that, as she 
expresses it, she ‘“‘speaks in rhyme half the time.” 

John Z. Macdonald, strictly speaking, is not 


[42] 


on American Music 


an American composer. He was born in Scot- 
land and came to America in 1881 at the age of 
twenty-one, but as he is one of the very few com- 
posers since Nero to enter public political life 1 he 
well deserves a place in this collection. In 1890 
he was elected city clerk of Brazil, Indiana, a 
position which he held for seven years. In 1898 
he was elected treasurer of Clay County, Indiana. 
This county is Democratic ‘“‘by between five and 
six hundred” but Mr. Macdonald was elected on 
the Republican ticket by a majority of one hun- 
dred and thirty-three. He was the only Repub- 
lican elected. Among the best known of Mr. 
Macdonald’s compositions is his famous Expan- 
sion Song, in which he predicted the fate of 
Aguinaldo. He has autograph letters, praising 
this song, from the late President McKinley, 
Colonel Roosevelt, General Harrison, Admiral 
Schley, John Philip Sousa, and other “eminent 
gentlemen.” 

Edward Dyer, born in Washington, was the 
son of a marble cutter who “helped to erect the 
io. treasury, Patent Office, and Capitol. .. . 
In the majority of his compositions there is a 
tinge of sadness which appeals to his audi- 
tors. ... Mr. Dyer never descends to coarse- 
ness or vulgarity in his productions; he writes 
pure, clean words, something that can be sung in 


1 Paderewski has since followed his example. 


[43 | 


The Authoritative Work 


the home, school, and on the stage to refined, 
respectable people.” 

We learn much of the study years of Mrs. 
Lucy L. Taggart: ‘From earliest childhood she 
received valuable musical instruction from her 
father (Mr. Longsdon) who, coming from Eng- 
land in 1835, purchased the first piano that came 
to Chicago, an elegant hand-carved instrument 
that is still treasured in the old home.” Later, 
“she studied under Prof. C. E. Brown of Owego, 
N. Y., Prof. Heimburger of San Francisco, and 
Herr Chas. Goffrie. Mrs. Taggart was also for 
five years a pupil of Senor Arevalo; the famous 
guitar soloist of Los Angeles. ... Mrs. Tag- 
gart has in preparation (1902) Methought he 
touched the strings, an idyl for piano in memory 
of the late Senor M. S. Arevalo.” 

David Weidley, born in Philadelphia, is the 
composer of the following songs, Old Spooney 
Spoopalay, Jennie Ree, Autumn Leaves, Hannah 
Glue, and Uncle Reuben and Aunt Lucinda. 
‘‘He has done much to create and elevate a taste 
for music in the community where he resides and 
where he is known as ‘Dave.’ Even the little 
children call him ‘Dave’ as freely and innocently 
as those who have known him for years, and 
there can be no greater compliment for any man 
than that he is known and loved by the children. 


[44 | 


on American Music 


Mr. Weidley is by profession a sheet metal 
worker. He isa P.G. of the I. O. O. F., anda 
P. C. in the Knights of Pythias. He is not iden- 
tified with any church, but loves and serves his 
fellow men.” 

In the biography of Delmer G. Palmer we are 
assured that “Versatility is a trait with which 
musical composers are not excessively burdened. 
There are few performers who can include The 
Moonlight Sonata and Schubert’s Serenade with 
selections from The Merry-Go-Round, and do 
justice to the expression of each, much less would 
such adaptability be looked for among com- 
posers. As most rules have exceptions, in this 
there is one who stands in a class occupied by no 
one else, Mr. Delmer G. Palmer, the ‘Green 
Mountain Composer,’ who at present resides in 
Kansas City. 

“As recently as 1899 Mr. Palmer wrote a song 
in the popular ‘ragtime,’ My Sweetheart is a 
Midnight Coon and almost in the same breath 
also wrote the heavy sacred solo, Christ in 
Gethsemane. The first is of the usual light 
order, characteristic of this class of music. The 
latter is as far removed to the contrary as comedy 
from tragedy. The ‘coon’ song entered the 
bubbling, effervescing cauldron of what is termed 
‘ragtime’ music among the multitudinous others, 


[45] 


The Authoritative Work 


and soon was seen peeping through at the surface 
among the lightest and most catchy. . . . The 
sacred solo found its level among the heavier in 
its class, and, if the term may be here applied, it 
was also a hit.” 

S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still 
lives (1902) in the old family residence at 
Natchez, Mississippi. ‘In this house is located 
the den where he has spent many hours with his 
collection of banjos and pictures, and in writing 
for and playing on the instrument which he 
adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 
1871).”’ We learn that he composed an “‘artis- 
tic banjo solo,” entitled Memories of Farland. 
‘‘Had this production or its companion piece, 
Thoughts of the Cadenza, been written by an old 
master for some other instrument and later have 
been adapted by a modern composer to the 
banjo, either or both of them would have been 
pronounced classic, barring some slight defects 
in form.” | 

I cannot stop to quote from the delightful re- 
ports of the lives and works of Albert Matson, 
George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia Pascoe Ob- 
lad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but 
it seems to me, Mencken, that I have submitted 
enough evidence to prove to you that the great 
book on American music has been written. 
Without one single mention of the names of Ho- 


[46] 


on American Music 


ratio W. Parker, George W. Chadwick, Freder- 
ick Converse, or Henry Hadley, by a transfer- 
ence of the emphasis to the circle where it belongs, 
the author of this undying volume has answered 
your prayer. 


December 11, 1917. 


[47] 


Music for the Movies 


Although it would appear that the moving- 
picture drama had opened up new worlds to the 
modern musician, no important composer, so far 
as I am aware, has as yet turned his attention 
to the writing of music for the films. If the 
cinema play is in its infancy, as certain enthusiasts 
would have us believe, then we may be sure that 
the day is not far distant when moving-picture 
scores will take their places on musicians’ book- 
shelves alongside those occupied by operas, sym- 
phonies, masses, and string quartets. In the 
meantime, entirely ignorant of the truth (or ob. 
livious to it, or merely helpless, as the case may 
be) that writing music for moving-pictures is a 
new art, which demands a new point of view, the 
musical directors of the picture theatres are strug- 
gling with the situation as best they may. Under 
the circumstances, it is remarkable, on the whole, 
how swiftly and how well the demand for music 
with the silent drama has been met. Certainly 
the quality of the music is on a level with, or even 
better than, the type of entertainment offered. 
Nevertheless, the directors have not squarely 


[48] 


Music for the Movtes 


faced the issue: they still continue to try to force 

- old wine into new bottles, arranging and rearrang- 
ing melodies and harmonies contrived for quite 
other occasions and purposes. Even when scores 
have been written for pictures the result has not 
shown any imaginative advance over the arranged 
scores. It is curious that it seems to have oc- 
curred to no one that the moving-picture demands 
a new kind of music. 

The composers, I should imagine, are only 
waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none 
of them has ever displayed any hesitancy about 
composing incidental music for the spoken drama. 
Mendelssohn wrote strains for A Midsummer 
Night’s Dream which seemed pledged to immor- 
tality until Granville Barker ignored them; the 
Wedding March is still in favour in Keokuk and 
Kankakee. Beethoven illustrated Goethe’s Eg- 
mont; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for 
The Tempest; Schubert was inspired to put 
down some of his most ravishing notes for a 
stupid comedy called Rosamunde; Grieg’s Peer 
Gynt music is performed more often than the 
play. More recent examples of incidental music 
for dramas are Saint-Saéns’s score for Brieux’s La 
Foi, Mascagni’s for The Eternal City, and Rich- 
ard Strauss’s for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Is 
it necessary to prolong the list? I have only 
mentioned, to be sure, a few obvious instances 


[49] 


Music for the Movtes 


that would spring at once to any musician’s mind, 
passing by the thousands upon thousands of 
scores devised by lesser composers for lesser 
plays. Of course, it has usually been the poetic 
drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand 
without it?) which has seemed to call for inci- 
dental music, but, with more or less disastrous 
consequences, to be sure, it has accompanied the 
unfolding of many a “‘drawing-room” comedy, 
especially during the eighties. 

On the whole, as a matter of fact, more films 
follow the general lines of Lady Windermere’s 
Fan or Peg o’ My Heart than those of poetic 
dramas such as Cymbeline or La Samaritaine. 
The case, however, is not analogous to that of 
the spoken drama. For, in motion-pictures, a 
poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its 
neighbour, a skeleton of action. ‘There is no con- 
ceivable distinction in the movies, beyond one 
created by preference, or taste, or the quality of 
the performance and the photography, between 
Dante’s Inferno and a film in which the beloved 
Charlie Chaplin looms large. 

When the first moving-picture was exposed on 
the screen it seems to have occurred at once to its 
projector that some kind of music must accom- 
pany its unreeling. ‘The silence evidently ap- 
palled him.t A moving-picture is not unlike a 


1In Chapter XIV of The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel 


[50] 


Music for the Movies 


ballet in that it depends entirely upon action (it 
differs from a ballet in that the action is not nec- 
essarily rhythmic), and who ever heard of a bal- 
let being performed without music? Sound cer: 
tainly has its value in creating an atmosphere and 
in emphasizing the thrill of the moving-picture, 
especially when that sound is selected and co- 
ordinated. It may also serve to divert the atten- 
tion. ‘he musical directors of the motion- 
picture theatres have tried to meet this problem; 
that they have not so far been wholly successful 
is not entirely their fault. 

It is no simple matter, for example, in a theatre 
in which the films are changed daily, a general 
rule even in the larger houses,! for a musician 
to arrange a satisfactory accompaniment for five 
thousand feet of action which may include any- 
thing from an earthquake in Cuba to a dinner in 
Park Lane, and it is scarcely possible, even if the 
distributors be so inclined, which they frequently 
are nowadays, to furnish a music score which will 
answer the purposes of bands of varying sizes, 
ranging from an upright piano, solo, to a full 
orchestra. As for the pictures without prear- 
ranged scores, the orchestra leaders and pianists 
must do the best they can for them. 

Lindsay says: “The perfect photoplay gathering-place would 


have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience.” 
1 This is no longer true. 
[51] 


Music for the Movies 


In some theatres, the chef d’orchestre strikes 
an attitude of total disrespect towards the pic- 
ture. He makes up his musical program as if 
he were giving a concert, not at all with the view 
of effectively accompanying the action on the 
screen. In a theatre on Second Avenue in New 
York, for example, I have heard an orchestra 
play the whole of Beethoven’s First Symphony 
as an accompaniment to Irene Fenwick’s per- 
formance of The Woman Next Door. As the 
symphony came to an end before the picture, it 
was supplemented by Waldteufel’s waltz, Les 
Patineurs. The result, in this particular instance, 
was neither altogether incongruous nor particu- 
larly displeasing, and it occurred to me that if 
one had to listen to music while the third act of 
Hedda Gabler were being enacted, one would pre- 
fer to hear something like Boccherini’s celebrated 
minuet or a light Mozart melody rather than 
anything ostensibly contrived to suit the situation. 

On the other hand, there are certain accom- 
panists for pictures who remind one by their 
methods of the anxiety of Richard Strauss to de- 
scribe every peacock and bean mentioned in any 
of his opera-books. If a garden is exposed on 
the screen, these players swing into The flowers 
that bloom in the spring; a love scene is the 
signal for Un peu d’amour; a religious episode 
suggests The Rosary to these ingenuous musi- 


[52] 


Music for the Movies 


cians; Japan brings a touch of Madama Butter- 
fly; a proposal of marriage, O Promise me; and 
a farewell, Tosti’s Good-bye! This expedient of 
appealing to the emotions through the intellect 
bears the stamp of approval, it may be admitted, 
of no less a composer than Richard Wagner. 
Waiting the birth of authentic moving-picture 
music, which a new composer must rise to invent, 
the safest way (not necessarily. the best) is the 
middle course, one method for this film, another 
for that. One of the difficulties which arises is 
the necessity of arranging a score for a theatre 
with a large band, where the leader must plan his 
accompaniment, or have it planned for him, for 
an entire picture before his men can play a note. 
Music cues must be definite: twenty bars of Alex- 
ander’s Ragtime Band, seventeen of ‘The Ride of 
the Valkyries, ten of Vissi d’arte, etc. An in- 
genious young man has discovered a way by which 
music and action may be synchronized. I feel the 
impulse to quote from the vivid report of his 
achievement, published in one of the motion- 
picture weekly journals: . “Here was a man-sized 
job—how to measure the action of the picture to 
the musical score, so that they would both come 
out equal at every part of the picture, and would 
be so exact that any orchestra might take the 
score and follow the movement of the play with 
absolute correctness. It was a question pri- 


[53 | 


Music for the Movies 
marily of mathematics, but even so, it was some 
time before a system of computation was devised 
and the undertaking gotten down to a certainty. 
As an illustration, on the opening night of one of 
the most notable photoplay productions now be- 
fore the public, the orchestra, notwithstanding a 
three weeks’ rehearsal, found at the conclusion 
of the picture that it was a page and a half be- 
hind the play’s action in the musical setting.” 
Then we learn that Frank Stadler of New York 
“provided the remedy for this condition of af- 
fairs. He remembered that Beethoven had over- 
come the difficulty of proper timing for his sona- 
tas by a mechanical arrangement known as the 
metronome, invented by a friend of his.” Mr. 
Stadler then began the measurement of a film 
with a metronome, a stenographer, and a watch. 
He quickly discovered that the film ran ten feet 
to every eight seconds, and he accordingly set the 
metronome for eight-second periods, “The 
stenographer made a note of the action of the 
picture each time the bell rang, with the result 
that when the entire picture had been run off Mr. 
Stadler had a complete record of the production. 
All that was necessary then was to select from the 
classics and the popular melodies the music which 
would give a suitable atmosphere and a harmon- 
ious accompaniment to the theme of the play, so 


[54] 


Music for the Movies 
synchronizing the music with the eight-second 
periods that every bar of it fitted the spirit of the 
many scores of scenes of the production.” 

The single man orchestra, the player of the up- 
right piano, need not make so many preparatory 
gestures. He may with impunity, if he be of an 
inventive turn of mind or if his memory be good, 
improvise his score as the picture unreels itself 
for the first time before what may very well be 
his astonished vision; after that, he may vary his 
accompaniment, as the shows of the day progress, 
improving it here or there, or not, as the case may 
be, but keeping generally as near to his original 
performance as possible. He relies, naturally, 
on a generous use of rum-ti-tum, shivery passages 
(known to orchestra leaders as “‘agits,” an abbre- 
viation of agitato) to accompany moments of ex- 
citement. ‘This music you will remember if you 
have ever attended a performance of a Lincoln 
J. Carter melodrama in which a train was 
wrecked, or a hero rescued from the teeth of a 
saw, or a heroine pursued by bloodhounds. Re- 
cently, in a moving-picture hall on Fourteenth 
Street in New York, I heard a pianist eke out a 
half-hour with similar poundings on two or three 
well-used chords, well-used even in the time of 
Haydn. ‘The scenes represented the whole of a 
two-act opera, and the ambitious pianist was try- 


[55] 


Music for the Movies 


ing, with his three meagre chords, to give his aud- 
ience the effect of singers, principals and chorus, 
and orchestra. 

A certain periodical, devoted to the interests 
of the moving-picture industry, conducts a depart- 
ment as first aid to the musical leaders and pian- 
ists who figure at these shows. Ina recent num- 
ber the editor of this department gives it as his 
solemn opinion that musicians who read fiction 
are the best equipped to play for pictures. ‘Then, 
with an almost tragic parenthesis, he continues: 
‘Reading fiction is the last diversion that the 
average musician will follow. He feels that all 
the necessary romance is to be found in his 
music.” Facts are dead, says this editor in sub- 
stance, but fiction is living and should make you 
weep. When you cry, all that remains for you 
to do is to think of a tune which will go hand in 
hand with the cause of your tears; this will serve 
you later when a similar scene occurs on the silver 
sheets. 

There is one tune which every capable moving- 
picture pianist has discovered will fit any Key- 
stone picture. For the benefit of the uninitiated 
I may state that in the Keystone farces some one: 
gets kicked or knocked down or spat upon several 
times in almost every scene. I am ignorant of. 
the title of this tune, but wherever Keystone pic- 
tures are shown, in Cedar Rapids, lowa, Grand 


[56] 


Music for the Movies 


Rapids, Michigan, Chicago, and even New York, 
I have heard it. When a character falls into 
the water, as at least ten of them invariably do, 
the pianist may vary the monotony of the melody 
by sitting on the piano or upsetting a chair. In 
one theatre I have known him to cause glass to 
be shattered behind the screen. How Marinetti 
would like that! 

However, the day of this sort of thing is rap- 
idly approaching its conclusion, I venture to 
prophesy. A few of the firms are already issu- 
ing arranged music scores for their productions. 
I might note in passing the score which accom- 
panied Geraldine Farrar’s screen performance of 
Carmen, largely selected from the music of Bi- 
zet’s opera, and Victor Herbert’s original score 
for The Fall of a Nation, a score which does not 
take full advantage of the new technique of the 
cinema drama. It will not be long before an en- 
terprising director engages an enterprising musi- 
cian to compose music for a picture. For the 
same reason + that d’Annunzio, very early in the 
career of the moving-picture, wrote a scenario for 
a film, I should not be surprised to learn that 
Richard Strauss was under contract to construct 
an accompaniment to a screened drama. It will 
be very loud music and it will require a band of 
one hundred and forty-three men to interpret it. 


1 $, 
[57] 


Music for the Movies 


Probably Strauss himself will conduct the first 
performance; later, excerpts will be played by the 
Boston Symphony Orchestra and the critics will 
say, in spite of Philip Hale’s diverting program 
notes, that this music should never be performed 
save in conjunction with the picture for which it 
was written. Mascagni is another composer who 
should find an excellent field for his talent in 
writing tone-poems for pictures, although he 
would contrive nothing more daring than a well- 
arranged series of illustrative melodies. 

But put Igor Stravinsky, or some other mod- 
ern genius, to work on this problem and see what 
happens! ‘The composer of the future should 
revel in the opportunity the moving-picture af- 
fords him to create a new form. ‘This form dif- 
fers from that of the incidental music for a play in 
that the flow of tone may be continuous and in 
that one never need soften the accompaniment in 
order that the voices may be heard; it differs 
from the music for a ballet in that the scene 
changes constantly; consequently, time-signatures, 
mood, and key, must be as constantly shifting. 
The swift flash from scene to scene, the cut-back, 
the necessary rapidity of the action, all these are 
adapted to inspire the future composer to bril- 
liant effort: a tinkle of this and a snatch of that, 
without working-out or development; illustra- 


[53] 


Music for the Movies 


tion, comment, piquant or serious, that’s what the 
new film music should be. The ultimate moving- 
picture score will be something more than a senti- 
mental accompaniment. 


November 10, 1915. 


[59] 


The Importance of Electrical 


Picture Concerts 


In a paper entitled Music for Museums! I 
once complained of the unvaried fare offered to 
us by the program makers of the symphony con- 
certs, a monotonous round of the symphonies of 
Beethoven and Brahms, the overtures of Weber, 
and excerpts from Wagner’s music dramas. A 
law should be enacted restricting orchestral or- 
ganizations to one Beethoven symphony a sea- 
son, I asserted, and I berated the conductors for 
their tendency to give the old masters places that 
should be reserved, at least on occasion, for the 
younger generation. My remarks seem to have 
been read and taken seriously, unless it can be 
supposed that the conductors themselves have 
seen the error of their ways, for during the cur- 
rent season (1916-17) we have observed Mr. 
Damrosch and Mr. Stransky (at least insofar as 
he has been able to do so without cracking the 
conditions of the famous Pulitzer will, which 
stipulates that the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and 
Wagner shall be frequently performed at the 


1In a wretched book called Music After the Great War. 


[60] 


Electrical Picture Concerts 


concerts of the Philharmonic Society) vying with 
one another in their effort to discover unper- 
formed works in dusty attics or on the shelves 
of the music shops and the libraries, and in their 
desire to give early hearings to new music by 
modern composers. Up to date, to be sure, they 
have ignored a good many compositions that we 
might conceivably listen to with pleasure, but they 
have provided us with specimens previously un- 
produced, at least in these benighted parts, of the 
art of Haydn and Mozart; Richard Strauss’s 
long-buried Macbeth has been exhumed and the 
new and still-born Alpine Symphony has been 
played; a suite from Stravinsky’s earliest ballet, 
Oiseau de feu, and several movements of a sym- 
phony by Zandonai have been added to the rep- 
ertory of the concert room; and d’Indy’s Istar, 
which we have long prayed for, has been revived, 
together with a more ancient treasure, Rafl’s Le- 
nore Symphony, once as popular as [chaikovsky’s 
Sixth. Now these are steps, tentative, to be 
sure, in the right direction, and although some of 
us, at the cost of burning in hell, would refuse to 
hear a good deal of this music twice, it is cer- 
tainly pleasanter to hear it once than to listen 
year after year to the standbys and battle horses 
of the ordinary concert season, a state of affairs 
which forces me to cry out with Shakespeare’s 
duke, ‘Enough; no more; ’tis not so sweet now 


[6r] 


The Importance of 


as it was before.” Dr. Muck in Boston does not 
agree with me. He even brings his men to New 
York to perform Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony 
and Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Scheherazade and calls 
the result a program. ‘This strikes me as inso- 
lence, but it is an efficient kind of insolence. The 
concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at 
Carnegie Hall are always sold out, and Dr. Muck 
could, if he so desired (I am expecting something 
of the sort), make up a program consisting of 
the Beautiful Blue Danube waltz and Beethoven’s 
Ninth Symphony without any appreciable effect 
on the box office. 

There is, of course, the necessity (at least it is 
so regarded) of educating the children. They 
must, according to the accepted theory of educa- 
tion, hear what has been done before they hear 
what is being done, but it does not seem neces- 
sary on this account to convert the best orchestra 
in America (one of the best anywhere) into a 
primary school. It is disheartening to realize, as 
some of us must, that this band, which one might 
hope to find exploiting new tonal combinations 
for our delectation, is fast becoming a museum 
where celebrated old bits of tune may be inspected 
and reheard. 

Hope has appeared, however, in an unex- 
pected quarter. ‘The extreme popularity of the 
cinema theatres was not to be guessed at a few 


[62] 


Electrical Picture Concerts 


seasons ago, nor could any of us have foretold 
that symphony orchestras of a size and quality 
which compare more than favourably with some 
of our established organizations would dispense 
sweet melody in these temples of amusement 
from late morning until midnight. The accom- 
paniment to the pictures is scarcely, as yet, a mat- 
ter for congratulation, as I have indicated in 
Music for the Movies, but the accompaniment to 
the pictures is only a small part of the present 
duty of a band in a theatre devoted to the elec- 
trical drama. As a matter of fact, a concert 
at a moving-picture show is now often a much 
more serious affair than an old Theodore Thomas 
popular program. Symphonies, concertos, rhap- 
sodies, arias, overtures (from those of Dichter 
und Bauer and Guillaume Tell to those of Lohen- 
grin and Susannens Geheimnis), all figure in the 
scheme. At one of these theatres more music is 
performed in one day than an assiduous concert- 
goer could hope to hear in three days in the con- 
cert halls. ‘The duration of a symphony concert 
is about two hours, including a fifteen-minute in- 
termission, that of a song recital about an hour 
and a half, but in a moving-picture theatre. an 
orchestra, or an organ, or a piano furnishes a 
pretty continuous flow of melody from eleven 
A.M. to eleven P.M. In the large houses soloists 
are sandwiched in between the films; sometimes 


[63 ] 


The Importance of 


these soloists are better performers than 
those one hears under more holy auspices; fre- 
quently they are identical. The violinists play 
Kreisler, the Beethoven Romances, and pieces by 
Drdla, Vieuxtemps, de Bériot, Paganini, and 
Mendelssohn. -Yes, the first movement of the 
E minor concerto figures occasionally in moving- 
picture theatre concert programs, where, at the 
present day, I am inclined to believe it belongs. 

This might be regarded as poetic justice. In 
any case, it is a fact, and a fact that cannot be 
ignored. It strikes me that from this time on 
we should hear precious little about ‘“‘concerts for 
young people,” “‘educational concerts,” ‘‘popular 
concerts,” and the like. In the circumstances, the 
directors of our best orchestras can invent no 
flimsy excuse for playing too much Beethoven, 
Schumann, Schubert, and Wagner, or any of the 
works of Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Tchai- 
kovsky. Brahms, by the peculiar veils of his art, 
seems, at the moment, to be protected from the 
cinema halls, although violinists occasionally per- 
form his Gipsy Dances there, and almost any day 
I expect to hear some deep-voiced contralto sing 
the Sapphische Ode or the Vergebliches Stand- 
chen between Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie 
Chaplin. 

The importance of the musical accompaniment 
to the films and of the intermediate concert num- 


[64 ] 


Electrical Picture Concerts 


bers is obviously recognized by the managers of 
such theatres as the Strand and the Rialto. The 
close attention with which the music is followed 
and the very violent applause which congratulates 
each performer, often exacting recall numbers, 
are ready proofs of the pleasure experienced by 
the customers. What is known as cheap music is 
seldom played. In fact, there is so much of an 
air of the concert hall about these performances 
that I am afraid they would bore me even if the 
music were less familiar to my ears. I should 
prefer, on these occasions, more informality, 
more excursions into the rhythmic realms con- 
jured up for us by Louis Hirsch and Irving Ber- 
lin. Nothing of the sort need be hoped for. 
The music performed, and desired by the audi- 
ences, is what is known to the less tone-educated 
multitudes as “‘classic.”’ 

Any intelligent child, therefore, with a little 
direction from a musical elder, could pick up the 
routine of the concert and opera world in a ten 
weeks’ course at the Rialto or the Strand. Such 
unavoidable songs as the Prologue to Pagliacci, 
the subsequent tenor lament from the same opera, 
all three of Dalila’s airs, the waltz from La 
Boheme, the prayer from Tosca, Celeste Aida, 
Cielo e mar, O Paradis, Danny Deever, Les 
Filles de Cadix, the Habanera from Carmen, 
Dich, theure Halle, The Iwo Grenadiers, Dost 


[65 ] 


The Importance of 


thou know that fair land? from Mignon, the 
Jewel Waltz from Faust, the Page’s Song from 
Les Huguenots, the Miserere, the Prayer from 
Cavalleria Rusticana, the Bach-Gounod Ave 
Maria, Depuis le jour from Louise, the Gavotte 
from Manon, Pleurez mes yeux from Le Cid, the 
Drinking Song from La Traviata, the Ave Maria 
from Otello, Plus grand dans son obscurité from 
Gounod’s La Reine de Saba, and Che faro senza 
Euridice? will be as familiar to his little ears as 
Dixie or the stolen strains of America. 

In like manner he will accustom himself to the 
delights of Kreisler’s Caprice Viennois and 
Tambourin Chinois, Beethoven’s two violin 
Romances, the Bach air arranged for the G 
string, the Preislied from Die Meistersinger, ar- 
ranged for violin by Wilhelmj, Pierné’s Sérénade, 
Dvorak’s Humoresque. . . . As for the concert 
repertory, he will hear the overtures to Eury- 
anthe and Oberon, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Tann- 
hauser, Sakuntala, Semiramide, and such concert 
pieces and tone-poems as the Danse Macabre, 
Phaéton, Mephistowaltzer, Les Préludes, the 
orchestrated rhapsodies of Liszt, Rimsky-Korsa- 
koff’s Spanish Caprice, the Arlésienne Suite, the 
Peer Gynt Suite, a number of Strauss waltzes, 
Massenet’s Elégie, the entr’actes from The 
Jewels of the Madonna, certain ballet airs of 


Gluck, etc. 
[66] 


Electrical Picture Concerts 


Moreover, he will not be cognizant of the 
fact that he is acquiring what is known as a 
“musical education” (the knowledge of and the 
ability to hum tunes from one-fifth of the afore- 
mentioned numbers would generally be consid- 
ered to constitute a musical education). Heaven 
forfend that such an idea be put into his head! 
The moving-picture concerts, like the pictures 
themselves, should be classified as amusements. 
Only, having gone this far, why not go a little 
farther? If one must become acquainted with 
Wagner in the concert hall at all, why not in 
the electrical picture theatre? There are no ex- 
cerpts in the present concert repertory that could 
not well be played there; the Funeral March 
from G6tterdammerung, the Lohengrin prelude, 
the Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, the Ride 
of the Valkyries, and all the rest of them, should 
be doled out, between the actualities and the 
feature film, to the youngsters seeking tone- 
knowledge and to those oldsters who enjoy hear- 
ing them divorced from the text and the stage 
action. And while you can scarcely expect Dr, 
Muck or Mr. Damrosch to pay Beethoven the 
compliment of giving him up altogether for the 
time being, his music might be played less by the 
symphony organizations in view of the hearings 
it would receive at the hands of the moving- 
picture societies. ‘The first two symphonies, at 


[67] 


© 


The Importance of 


any rate, might be left to their mercies. Men- 
delssohn, as a symphonist, assuredly should be 
tendered to their keeping . . . Grieg and Liszt, 
for the most part . . . Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, 
and Massenet . . . a good deal of Saint-Saéns 
. . . Glazunoff and Elgar, certainly Elgar, if 
the moving-picture audiences would permit it. 
There is another field for the Strand Phil- 
harmonic Society, for the band of the Academy 
of Music: the exploitation of the American com- 
poser 1 who, one complains, never gets his chance 
at a hearing. The conductors of these concerts 
might introduce new music by George W. Chad- 
wick, Henry Hadley, Arthur Farwell, Edgar 
Stillman Kelley, and Ernest Schelling. 

If anything so nearly pleasant as this happens 
in the musical world (and there are, as I stated 
at the beginning of this paper, certain indications 
that it is happening), think of the space there 
would be on the programs of our august societies 
for the new music our curious ears are aching to 
hear! ‘Think of the possible resurrections of 
works by Mozart, Haydn, and César Franck that 
one never does hear. Perhaps Debussy’s La 
Mer, Nocturnes, and Images (Iberia, Gigue, 
and Rondes de Printemps), all too infrequently 
performed, would become more familiar. I 
should like to listen at least once to Albéniz’s 


1This actually happened. See page 71. 


Electrical Picture Concerts 


Catalonia and Turina’s La Procesién del Rocio, 
which Debussy has compared to a luminous 
fresco, which reminds me that Spanish music al- 
together is unknown in our concert halls. We 
might hear more Sibelius and Musorgsky .. . 
Borodin .. . John Carpenter . . . Schoenberg’s 
Five Pieces . . . Stravinsky’s Sacre du Prin- 
temps.1. Why not even Petrouchka? Orn- 
stein’s The Fog, Ravel, Dukas (has La Péri been 
played here?), d’Indy, Korngold .. . 


December 7, 1916. 


11t is an interesting fact that, during the seven years which 
have elapsed since I wrote this paper, nearly, if not quite all of 
the pieces I mentioned have been performed in New York. It 
was not until January 1924, however, that Stravinsky’s Sacre 
du Printemps, which I heard in Paris in 1913, was given a 
hearing in New York. 


[69] 


Movies for Program Notes 


Five years ago in an oracular mood, I ven- 
tured to prophesy that moving-picture entertain- 
ments would soon be listed with symphony con- 
certs. Probably, at the time, I wore the mask 
of Cassandra and nobody believed me. Never- 
theless, my sapient prognostications have been 
amply fulfilled. No great composer, to be sure, — 
has yet constructed a score to fit the flash-backs 
and double exposures of Bebe Daniels, but that 
will come later. Indeed, I am willing to predict 
that, within the next ten years, Igor Stravinsky 
will set a Chaplin film to music. Why not? In 
the meantime, while they gaze on Gloria Swanson 
in the arms of Wallace Reid, picture patrons are 
regaled with snippets of Verdi and Friml. 
Mary Pickford cutifies to a bar or two of Schu- 
bert, followed by a bar or two of Jerome Kern, 
while Norma Talmadge cavorts to remnants of 
Grieg and Offenbach. At the beginning of the 
show, and between the news and feature films, a 
more or less competent ‘‘symphony orchestra” of 
approximately ninety-five men (in the larger 
houses) performs music that hitherto could only 


[70] 


Movies for Program Notes 


be heard in Carnegie Hall or the Opera House. 
Within a few months, indeed, at these cinema 
concerts, I have listened to the overture to Iphi- 
génie en Aulide, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance 
March, Dvorak’s Carneval overture, the andante 
con moto from Schubert’s C major Symphony, 
Dukas’s |’Apprenti-sorcier, the first movement of 
Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, the overture to 
Oberon, the March from the Symphonie Pathe- 
tique, Ichaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, and even 
the vorspiel to Die Meistersinger!* In 1920, 
the direction of the Rialto Theatre in New York 
went so far as to offer a prize of $500 for the 
best orchestral composition submitted by an 
American. Among the judges in this contest 
were Artur Bodanzky, Victor Herbert, Carl 
Deis, and O. G. Sonneck. Eighty-five composi- 
tions were entered in this competition and the 
gold was awarded to Mortimer Wilson of Iowa 
for his New Orleans overture. This work was 
performed at the Rialto during the week of 
October 24, 1920. The week of December 19, 
Maurice Baron’s Ouverture Triomphale, the 
second choice of the judges, was given a hearing. 
I listened to both of these numbers and can 

1$trauss’s Ein Heldenleben, which even symphony society 
audiences found heavy ten years ago, was performed at the 
Capitol Theatre in New York during November, 1922. A 


year later, lunching at the Ritz-Carlton, I became aware that 
the orchestra was playing Debussy’s l’Aprés-midi d’un faune. 


[71] 


Movies for Program Notes 


testify that they were no better and no worse 
than might have been expected. 

Soloists appear at these moving-picture con- 
certs. I have heard them sing the Cardinal’s air 
from La Juive, Son lo spirito che nega from 
Mefistofele, Una voce poco fa, Il est doux, il est 
bon from Heérodiade, and the Polacca from 
Mignon. I have heard them play Sarasate’s 
Zigeunerweisen, Liszt’s piano concerto in E flat, 
Saint-Saéns’s Le Cygne, Tchaikovsky’s B flat 
minor piano concerto, Grieg’s piano concerto, 
and Bruch’s arrangement for cello of the Kol 
Nidrei. These soloists are by no means all am- 
ateurs or broken-down opera singers. The first 
violin of the band in one of the New York elec- 
trical picture houses, who frequently appeared 
there in the role of virtuoso, was engaged by the 
Chicago Orchestra to fill a similar chair, and 
Percy Grainger, himself, played one week at the 
Capitol Theatre. It takes no great stretch of 
the imagination to foresee that, in the not too 
far-distant future, Pablo Casals, Harold Bauer, 
Elena Gerhardt, Eva Gauthier, and, probably, 
even Geraldine Farrar, will have hearings under 
these happy auspices. 

There is no doubt in my mind, as a matter of 
fact, that the cut and dried Carnegie Hall type 
of concert, formal and forbidding, is bound to 
disappear in favour of this warmer and more 


[72] 


Movies for Program Notes 


informal mode of entertainment, unless the entre- 
preneurs of the symphony societies take steps to 
meet this new and increasingly formidable form 
of competition. Percy Grainger, playing a Stein- 
way grand in a darkened auditorium, in a highly 
decorative set arranged by John Wenger, with an 
amber light focused on his aureole of golden hair, 
is a vastly more effective performer than the 
Percy Grainger who plays on the bare stage of 
Carnegie Hall, with the house and its occupants 
brightly illuminated. Anybody who heard him 
at the Capitol Theatre will support me in this 
categorical statement. It must also be taken into 
consideration that the average customer cannot 
detect the difference between a performance of 
Rimsky-Korsakoft’s Scheherazade by the Rivoli 
Orchestra and one by the Boston Symphony. 
Naturally he pays his money where he can hear 
the Scheherazade and see W. S. Hart on the 
same bill. 

The backers and angels of the various sym- 
phony organizations may as well make up their 
minds that they will be compelled to face this new 
music. Now, observing how much effect the 
cinema palaces have made by combining music 
with pictures, it has occurred to me to wonder 
why some enterprising Henry Lee Higginson or 
Harry Harkness Flagler has not hit upon the 
idea of combining pictures with music. ‘The 


[73 | 


Movies for Program Notes 


ways in which this suggestion might be turned 
to advantage, without loss of dignity, are man- 
ifold. Let our present concern be a considera- 
tion of pictures as an excellent substitute for 
program notes. 

The obvious first use of the films in this capac- 
ity would have an educational value. For ex- 
ample, one reads in the program books that the 
first theme of Marecipio’s Third Symphony is a 
tender melody in G flat minor played by the flute 
and the first violins. ‘To the layman, it will be 
readily admitted, this statement conveys nothing 
whatever. I doubt, indeed, if the majority of 
the auditors who attend symphony concerts can 
distinguish the difference between a flute and a 
violin. Certainly, when glockenspiel, tympani, 
celesta, bassoon, clarinet, and oboe are concerned, 
the tired business man has not the faintest con- 
ception of how they look or sound. I am ac- 
quainted with a lawyer, a constant attendant of 
symphony concerts for the past ten years, who 
was amazed to discover recently that the bassoon 
was a wind instrument. He had always con- 
fused it with the double-bass. When this fellow 
read descriptions of various themes. he must have 
been very much puzzled. My proposition would 
discourage such confusion. Simply, it is for the 
title of a theme to be flashed on the screen at the 
moment it is announced in the orchestra. ‘Thus: 


[74] 


Movies for Program Notes 
FIRST THEME 


A little later this will be followed by another title: 
SECOND THEME 


Then will come a proclamation of the working- 
out section, with indications here and there of the 
uses of the various themes. Still later, the re- 
capitulation will be published, and the coda, if 
there be one. The performance may be pre- 
luded by general remarks about the composer and 
such particularizations regarding the symphony 
as may be deemed pertinent. If this course be 
rigorously pursued throughout the season, by the 
first of April, every constant concert-goer may be 
expected to know at least as much about the so- 
nata form as I do. 

It does not seem necessary to dwell at length 
on the advantages that will ensue from a resort 
to this simple device. Briefly, however, the 
hearer will be put into possession of accurate in- 
formation at the time when he most needs it and 
when, therefore, it will make its maximum effect; 
there will be no rustling of programs to disturb 
honest listeners; above all, the requirements of 
the electrical machine will demand the darken- 
ing of the auditorium, an immense advantage. 
There is, to be sure, no apparent reason why the 
auditorium should not be darkened in any case. 


[75] 


Movies for Program Notes 


The fact remains, however, that it never is. 
Seemingly, it never will be until there springs up 
a sufficiently compelling motive for this desirable 
procedure. 

A second and more novel use of titles may 
be made under circumstances in which program 
notes are of small avail. I refer to quotations. 
Authors frequently quote from other authors. 
They indicate these borrowings either by inverted 
commas or by a reference to the original book or 
its writer. ‘There is no hint of plagiarism in this 
line of conduct, which is recognized and regular. 
On the other hand, a composer, who quotes, con- 
sciously and intentionally, from another com- 
poser, is in danger of being misunderstood. He 
can, to be sure, label his intention in the printed 
score. When Mélisande speaks in Ariane et 
Barbe-Bleue, Dukas cites a phrase from De- 
bussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. In the book of the 
lyric drama this fact is noted. In performance, 
however, it cannot be noted. In this particular 
instance, with Meélisande singing on the stage, 
Dukas’s intention is fairly obvious. Suppose, 
however, that the composer of a symphony 
wishes to quote a few bars from Beethoven for 
some reason of emphasis or irony. How can he 
indicate this to his auditors? ‘The fact is that 
he cannot indicate it. He may mention his ob- 
ligation in the published score, and the conductor 


[76] 


Movies for Program Notes 


who performs the work may be aware of it, but, 
even if it be acknowledged in the program notes, 
the passage cannot be denoted with exactitude. 
Moreover, the composer cannot depend on every 
auditor reading these notes; furthermore, many 
concerts are given without any notes at all. His 
purpose, therefore, is liable to misconstruction. 
My plan, then, is for a title to be flashed on the 
screen at the exact moment the quotation is being 
performed, something like this: 


THIS PHRASE IS QUOTED 
FROM 
PURCELL’S DIDO AND ANEAS 


There is a passage in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben 
in which the composer cites themes from his own 
earlier works. By means of this simple device, 
each of these quotations (I believe there are 
twenty-three) could be distinctively labelled. 
But the third and most important possible use 
of the electrical pictures in connection with sym- 
phony concerts carries us much further than the 
mere employment of titles: I think it would be 
an excellent idea to illustrate symphonic poems, 
all program music, indeed, by appropriate accom- 
panying action on the screen. This expedient 
1In the matter of synchronization there are technical dif- 


ficulties to be overcome, but I leave these to the chefs d’orchestres 
and the moving-picture producers. 


[77] 


Movies for Program Notes 


would provide a concert with almost as many 
moving-pictures as are presented in an evening 
at a cinema theatre, for it is well to realize that 
eight-tenths of the music played at modern con- 
certs is program music. Let me offer a concrete 
example. When an orchestra plays Dukas’s 
l’Apprenti-sorcier, it is the custom to print 
Goethe’s verses, on which the tone-poem is 
founded, in the program books. Why not, in- 
stead, cause a picture to be taken which will syn- 
chronize exactly with the music, and run off this 
' picture whenever and wherever the music is per- 
formed? A roll of films, indeed, should be sold 
with each score. Now, when the theme of the 
broomstick demon, roused to fetch water by the 
inquisitive apprentice, is heard in the orchestra, 
the stick will rise on the screen and go through 
the motions of bearing pails of water into the 
laboratory of the sorcerer until the room is 
flooded. In vain the apprentice begs him to de- 
sist, for, although the lad has puzzled out the 
incantation necessary to summon the spirit, he 
has neglected to acquaint himself with the counter- 
charm essential to dispel the disturbing presence. 
This magic broom, pouring cut pails of water, 
could be cleverly counterfeited on the silver 
sheets, and, I think that the music performed be- 
fore this appropriate action would make treble 


the ordinary effect. 
[78] 


Movies for Program Notes 


Just here, some conservative confederate vet- 
eran or Presbyterian music critic from Joliet will 
rise to confront me with the dictum that music 
which depends upon another art is not music at 
all. I will smite this churl right lustily with a 
blow which he will remember all his days. What 
he says is, perhaps, true—I neither affirm nor 
deny it—but granted that such a phenomenon as 
program music exists—and any honest concert- 
goer will testify to the truth of my earlier asser- 
tion that eight-tenths of all the music performed 
at contemporary symphony concerts is program 
music—it is certainly preferable that this pro- 
gram be enacted before the eyes than that it be 
presented as reading matter. There is, I believe, 
no room for argument here. ‘The symphonies of 
Beethoven, Brahms, and a few others, pure mu- 
sic, so-called, should be played with titles on spe- 
cial educational occasions, but program music 
should invariably be performed to pictorial ac- 
companiment. I am not quite sure but that 
even Beethoven’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies 
should be included in this class. 

Berlioz’s mad, transcendental Fantastic Sym- 
phony, presented in the customary manner, is, 
it must be admitted, a colossal bore, but, per- 
formed with cinema decorations, the opium 
dream of the young musician, the brilliant ball, 
the pastoral scene in the fields, the ghoulish 


[79] 


Movies for Program Notes 


march to the scaffold, and the concluding Wal- 
purgisnacht scene, the witches’ sabbath, with its 
revels of two-horned goats, mephitic necroman- 
cers, and writhing pythonesses, would be another 
matter. Nijinsky and his Russian nymphs 
should film I’Aprés-midi d’un faune, as they 
danced it. The Russians might also give their 
effulgent interpretation of Balakireff’s Thamar. 
Debussy’s La Mer is a superb movie subject, and 
so is César Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit. In 
Saint-Saéns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale, I see Francis 
X. Bushman as the subjugated Hercules spin- 
ning for Theda Bara as Omphale. Phaéton 
would be more difficult to photograph, but the 
Danse Macabre! would be easy. Wagner, of 
course, when performed in concert, should be 
filmed. During a rendering of the overture to 
Tannhauser, one should see a vision of the Venus- 
berg and the march of the pilgrims. To illus- 
trate the march from Gotterdammerung, the 
moon should shine on the cortége of Siegfried, as 
the body of the hero is borne slowly through the 
mountain passes. ‘The picture illustrating the 

1 In 1922, this was actually done under the direction of Dudley 
Murphy, with Adolf Bolm, Ruth Page, and Olin Howland as 
the pantomimists. -I saw and heard a performance at the 
Rialto Theatre in New York during the week of July 23, 1922. 


I have been informed that Mr. Murphy arranged a similar 
picturization of l’Aprés-midi d’un faune, but I did not see 


this. 
[80] 


Movies for Program Notes 


prelude to Tristan, however, could only be exhib- 
ited privately before the Society of the Friends of 
Music. ‘The State Board of Censors would cer- 
tainly issue no permit for public showings of this 
film at Carnegie Hall. 

The music of Richard Strauss, all of it, bawls 
for illustration. How true this is, one realizes 
completely when one listens to his operas. 
Every bar in Salome is accentuated by the stage 
action: the sombre piety of John, the sensuality 
of the Princess of Judea, the ribaldry of Herod, 
the shrieking peacocks, and the raucous Jews. 
Think of the effect the symphonic poems would 
make when visualized! Aus Italien, with views 
of the Campagna, the ruins of Rome, the shores 
of Sorrento, concluding with a wild Neapolitan 
tarantella; Till Eulenspiegel, for which Nijinsky 
would again be requisitioned; Don Juan, probably 
another private picture. Macbeth and Don 
Quixote, never very successful when presented as 
pure music, would benefit especially by this treat- 
ment. Even the celebrated episode of the sheep 
would at last be clear. 

But the particular Strauss works I desire to 
see filmed are the Sinfonia Domestica and Ein 
Heldenleben. Richard, as the hero of these 
autobiographical compositions, must be asked to 
assume the leading role in both productions. In 
the first, he must be assisted by his wife and a 


[3r] 


Movtes for Program Notes 


baby; probably his own son has grown too big to 
play his own part.!_ In the second, I look for- 
ward with particular interest to a glimpse of the 
battle with the critics. This section of the film, 
I think, will have to be retaken in every country 
in which the symphonic poem is played. Cer- 
tainly, I have no great curiosity to see Strauss in 
combat with the German Spanuths, Weissmanns, © 
Istels, and Riemanns. Let us inveigle the com- 
poser to Fort Lee with our local Sarceys. Let us 
see Papa Krehbiel heaving a brick at him, while 
Strauss retaliates with his booted toe in Papa 
Krehbiel’s tenderest spot. Let us watch Mr. 
Finck valiantly climbing a hill, bearing over his 
shoulder a placard with the device: 


JOHANN NOT RICHARD! 


and Strauss putting him to route amidst utter 
cacophony. At the close of this episode I see 
Henry Theophilus in a heap at the foot of the 
hill, woefully nursing a bruised shin. The com- 
bat with Henderson should be a glove match in 
the ring. 

These are merely a few suggestions, not too 
idle, I hope, which an enterprising conductor with 
a little money would do well to carry out. The 
idea, of course, is capable of being stretched to 


1He was recently married (1924)! 


[82] 


Movies for Program Notes 


infinitude. But the first man who accepts even 
these few hints merely at their face value will no 
longer have to worry about a deficit at the end 
of the season, no longer have to struggle with the 
recalcitrant and ignorant ladies who form his 
board and attempt to dictate his programs. 
Without the aid of Fritz Kreisler or Frau 
Schumann-Heink, he can always fill his house, and 
the hieroglyphics on the front door will be 
changed from S. O. S. to S. R. O. 


October 18, 1921. 


[83 ] 


The New Art of the Singer 


The art of vocalization is retarding the ad- 
vance of the modern music drama. This is a 
simple statement of a fact although, doubtless, 
you are as accustomed as I am to hearing it ex- 
pressed a rebours. How many times have I read 
that the art of singing is in its decadence, that 
soon there would not be one artist left fitted to 
deliver vocal music in public! The Earl of 
Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort 
in 1825, for he found the great Catalani but a 
sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pac- 
chierotti and Banti. I protest against this mis- 
conception. Any one who asserts that there are 
laws which govern singing, physical, scientific 
laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. 
For twenty years I have heard this same man 
shouting in the marketplace that a piece without 
action was not a play (usually the drama he re- 
ferred to had more real action than that which 
decorates the progress of Nellie, the Beautiful 
Cloak Model), that a composition without mel- 
ody (meaning a creation by Richard Wagner, 
Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not 


[84] 


The New Art of the Singer 


music, and that verse without rhyme was not 
poetry. ‘This same type of brilliant mind will 
go on to aver (forgetting the Scot and the 
Greek) that men who wear skirts are not men, 
and that women who smoke cigars are not women; 
indeed, he will not hesitate to settle a score of 
other problems in so silly a manner that a ten 
year old, half-witted schoolboy, after three min- 
utes light thinking, could be depended upon to 
do better. 

The rules for the art of singing, laid down in 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have be- 
come obsolete. How could it be otherwise? 
They were contrived to fit a certain style of com- 
position. We have but the briefest knowledge, 
indeed, of how people sang before 1700, al- 
though records exist praising the performances 
of Archilei and others. If a different standard 
of vocalization existed before 1600 there appears 
to be no sound reason why a different standard 
should not exist after 1917. As a matter of 
fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the 
contrary, a different standard does exist. In cer- 
tain respects the change in tradition is taken for 
granted. We do not, for example, expect to 
hear male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of 
Mount Edgcumbe admired this artificial form of 
voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His 
favourite singer, Pacchierotti, was a male so- 


[85] 


The New Art of the Singer 


prano. But other breaks have been made with 
tradition, breaks which are not yet taken for 
granted. When you find that all but one or two 
singers in every opera house in the world are 
ignoring the rules in one way or another you may 
be certain, despite the protests of the professors, 
that the rules are dead. ‘Their excuse has disap- 
peared and they remain only as dead command- 
ments framed to fit an old religion. 

In Handel’s day a singer was accustomed to 
stand in one spot on the stage and sing; nothing 
else was required of him. He was not asked to 
walk about or to act; even expression in his sing- 
ing was limited to pathos. ‘The singers of this 
period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni, Faustina, 
Caftarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and 
Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to the 
preparation of their voices for the display of a 
definite variety of florid music. ‘They had noth- 
ing else to learn. As a consequence, they were 
expected to be particularly efficient. Porpora, 
Caffarelli’s teacher, is said to have devoted six 
years to the instruction of his pupil before he sent 
him forth to be “the greatest singer in the 
world.” Contemporary critics appear to have 
been highly pleased with the result, but there is 
some excuse for H. T. Finck’s impatience, ex- 
pressed in Songs and Song Writers: ‘The 
favourites of the eighteenth century Italian au- 


[36] 


The New Art of the Singer 


diences were artificial male sopranos, like Far- 
inelli, who was frantically applauded for such 
circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on 
to a note, or racing with an orchestra and get- 
ting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who entertained 
his audiences by singing, in one breath, a chro- 
matic chain of trills up and down two octaves. 
Caffarelli was a pupil of the famous vocal teacher, 
Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of 
monotonous successions of florid arias resembling 
the music that is now written for flutes and 
violins.” All very well for the day, no doubt, 
but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina 
sing Mélisande? And what modern roles would 
be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the eight- 
eenth century? 

When composers began to set dramatic texts 
to music, trouble immediately appeared in the 
doorway. ‘The coevals of Sophie Arnould, the 
“creator” of Iphigénie en Aulide, are agreed that 
she was greater as an actress than she was as a 
singer. David Garrick pronounced her a finer 
actress than Clairon. From that hour to the 
present there has continued to rage a triangular 
conflict between critic, composer, and _ singer, 
which, up to date, it must be admitted, has been 
consistently won by the academic pundits, for, 
although the singer has struggled, she has gen- 
erally bent under the blows of the critical knout, 


[87] 


The New Art of the Singer 


thereby holding the music drama more or less in 
the state it was in a hundred years ago (every 
critic and almost every composer will tell you that 
any modern opera can be sung according to the 
laws of bel canto, and enough singers exist, un- 
fortunately, to justify this assertion), save that 
the music is not so well sung, according to the old 
standards, as it was then. No singer has pos- 
sessed enough courage to entirely defy tradition, 
to refuse to study with a teacher, to embody her 
own natural ideas in the performance of music, to 
found a new school... but there have been 
many rebels. 

The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and 
Rossini, on the whole, do not demand great his- 
trionic exertion from their interpreters and for 
a time singers trained in the old Handelian 
tradition met every requirement of these com- 
posers and their audiences. If more action were 
demanded than in Handel’s day, the newer music, 
in compensation, was easier to sing. Neverthe- 
less, early in the nineteenth century we observe 
that those artists who, pushing on to the new 
technique, strove to be actors as well as singers 
lost something of the old vocal facility. I need 
only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. ‘The 
lady was admittedly the greatest lyric artist of 
her day, although it is recorded that her slips 
from true intonation were frequent. When she 


[33] 


The New Art of the Singer 


could no longer command a steady tone, the 
beaux restes of her art and her authoritative style 
caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing her 
then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ron- 
coni’s voice, according to Chorley, barely ex- 
ceeded an octave; it was weak and habitually out 
of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal 
agility and he was monotonous in his use of orna- 
ment. Nevertheless, Chorley asserts that Ron- 
coni afforded him more pleasure than almost any 
other singer he had ever heard in the theatre! 
If this critic did not grasp this opportunity to 
point the way to the future, on another occasion 
he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolu- 
tion: “There might, there should be yet, a new 
Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, 
more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini’s set- 
ting of the ‘grand fiendish part’ (to quote the 
words of Mrs Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, 
as mu c, it becomes simply impossible to be ex- 
ecuted, so frightful is the strain on the energies 
of her who is to represent the heroine. Com- 
pared with this character, Beethoven’s Leonora, 
Weber’s Euryanthe, are only so much child’s 
play.” This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, 
but at the same time it is suggestive. 

The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach be- 
tween the two schools. Wagner called upon the 
singer to express powerful emotion, passionate 


[89] 


The New ‘Art of the Singer 


feeling, over a great wave of sound, nay, in many 
instances, against a great wave of sound. It is 
small occasion for wonder that singers began to 
bark. ‘They very nearly expired, indeed, under 
the strain of trying successfully to mingle Por- 
pora and passion. According to W. F. Apthorp, 
Max Alvary once said that, considering the emo- 
tional intensity of music and situations, the con- 
stant co-operation of the surging orchestra, and, 
most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the 
reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing 
actors did not go stark mad, before the very faces 
of the audience, in parts like Tristan or Siegfried. 
The critics, in this new situation, were con- 
sistently inexorable; they stood by their guns. 
There was but one way to sing the new music and 
that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In 
time, by dint of persevering, talking night and 
day, writing day and night, they convinced the 
singer. ‘The music drama developed, but the 
singer was held in his place. Some artists, great 
geniuses, of course (for example, Jean de Reszke 


11t is significant, in this connection, that Wagner himself 
admitted that it was a singer, Mme. Schroeder-Devrient, who 
revealed to him the possibilities of dramatic singing. He 
boasted that he was the only one to learn the lesson. “She 
was the first artist,” writes H. T. Finck, “who fully realized 
the fact that in a dramatic opera there may be situations where 
characteristic singing is of more importance than beautiful 


singing.” 
[90] 


The New Art of the Singer 


and Lilli Lehmann) made the compromise suc- 
cessfully, but they rendered the further progress 
of the composer more difficult thereby; music 
remained merely pretty. The successors of these 
supple singers even learned to sing Richard 
Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puc- 
cint! At a performance of Madama Butterfly a 
Japanese once demanded why the singers were 
producing those nice round tones in moments of 
passion; why not ugly sounds? 

Will any composer arise with the courage to 
write an opera which cannot be sung? Stra- 
vinsky came very near to achieving this happy 
result in The Nightingale, but I am looking for- 
ward to a more complete break with the past. 
Think of the range of sounds made by the Jap- 
anese, the Gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk- 
singers. [he composer of the future may ask 
for shrieks, groans, squeaks, screams, a thousand 
delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal 
tones, from his interpreters. ‘Why should the 
gamut of expression on our opera stage be so 
much more limited than it is in our music halls? 
Why should the Hottentots be able to make so 
many delightful noises that we are incapable of 
producing? Composers, up to date, have taken 
into account a singer’s apparent inability to bridge 
difficult intervals. Why? It is only by ignoring 
all such artificial limitations that the new music 


[or] 


The New Art of the Singer 


will definitely emerge and the new art of the 
singer be born. What marvellous effects might 
be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in 
the human voice! When will the obfusc pundits 
stop shouting for what Avery Hopwood calls 
‘ascending and descending tetrarchs ?” 

But, some one will argue, with the passing of 
bel canto what will become of the operas of Mo- 
zart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who will 
sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age 
of song, bel canto is not passing as swiftly as that. 
Singers will continue to be born into this world 
who are able to cope with the floridity of this 
music, for they are born, not made. Amelita 
Galli-Curci will have her successors, just as 
Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this variety 
begin to sing naturally in their infancy, and they 
continue to sing, just sing. One touch of drama 
or emotion and their voices crack. Remember 
Nellie Melba’s sad experience with Siegfried. 
The great Mario had scarcely studied singing 
(one authority says that he had taken a few les- 
sons of Meyerbeer)! when he made his début in 
Robert, le Diable, and there is no evidence that he 
studied very much afterwards. Melba, herself, 


1 Mario, as a matter of fact, also studied with Bordogni of 
the Conservatoire for voice production, with Michelet of the 
Comédie Francaise for declamation, and with Ponchard of the 
Opéra-Comique, but for no extended period. 


[92 | 


The New Art of the Singer 


spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi in 
preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli- 
Curci asserts that she has had very little to do 
with professors, and I do not think that Mme. 
Tetrazzini spent her youth in mastering vocal- 
izzi. As a matter of fact, she studied singing 
only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr. Hans- 
lick that at the age of seven she had sung Una 
voce poco fa with the same embellishments which 
she employed later when she appeared in the 
opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers 
are as much freaks of nature as tortoise-shell cats 
and, like those rare felines, they are usually fe- 
males of late, although such singers as Battistini 
and Bonci remind us that men once sang with as 
much agility as women. But naturally, when this 
type of singer finally becomes extinct, the operas 
which depend upon it will disappear likewise; for 
a cognate reason the works of Monteverde and 
Handel have dropped out of the repertory and 
the Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan inter- 
ludes are no longer current on our stage. None 
of our actors understands the style of Chinese 
acting; consequently, it would be impossible to 
present a Chinese drama in our theatre. As 
Deirdre wails in Synge’s great play: “It’s a 
heartbreak to the wise that it’s for a short space 
we have the same things only.” We cannot, in- 
deed, have everything. No one doubts that the 


[93 | 


The New Art of the Singer 


plays of A‘schylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are 
great dramas, but to become personally cog- 
-nizant of that fact today one is obliged to read 
them; the composers to whom I have just re- 
ferred can also be admired in the closet. Even 
now, no more than two works of Rossini, the 
most popular composer of the early nineteenth 
century, are to be heard.1 What has become of 
Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and the others? 
There are no singers to sing them and so they 
have been dropped from the repertory without 
being missed. Can any of our young misses hum 
Di tanti palpiti? You know they cannot. I 
doubt if I could find two girls in New York, and 
I mean girls with a musical education, who could 
tell me in what opera the air belongs, and yet in 
the early nineteenth century this tune was as 
popular as Un bel di is today. 

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, 
not altogether without reason. Nevertheless, at 
one time, its interpreters fired composers to their 
best efforts. ‘That day has passed. That day 
passed seventy years ago. It may occur to you 
that something is wrong when singers of a cer- 
tain type can only find the proper means to ex- 
ploit their voices in works of the past, operas 
which are dead. It is to be noted that Nellie 
Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely 


1 Seldom more than one. 


[94] 


The New Art of the Singer 


unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as 
those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and 
Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Ade- 
lina Patti? and Marcella Sembrich appeared in 
few, if any, new works of importance. They 
had no bearing on the march of musical history. 
Here, then, is an entirely paradoxical situation: 
a set of interpreters who apparently exist only 
for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the 
past. What would we think of a modern actor 
who could make no effect save in the tragedies of 
Corneille? Berlioz, one of the first to foresee 
the coming day, forewarned us in his Mémoires: 
“We shall always find a fair number of female 
singers, popular from their brilliant singing of 
brilliant trifles, and odious to the great masters 
because utterly incapable of properly interpret- 
ing them. ‘They have voices, a certain knowl- 
edge of music, and flexible throats; they are 
lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women 
are regular monsters and all the more formidable 
to composers because they are often charming 
monsters. ‘This explains the weakness of certain 
masters in writing falsely sentimental parts, 
which attract the public by their brilliancy. It 
also explains the number of degenerate works, 
the gradual degradation of style, the destruction 
of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic 


1 She made an abysmal failure in Carmen. 


[95 | 


The New Art of the Singer 


properties, the contempt for the true, the grand, 
and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepi- 
tude of art in certain countries.” } 

So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are 
continually pointing out, the age of bel canto is 
really passing, there is no actual occasion for 
grief. All fashions in art pass and what is 
known as bel canto is just as much a fashion as 
the bombastic style of acting that prevailed in 
Victor Hugo’s time or the “realistic’’ style of 
acting we prefer today. All interpretative art 
is based primarily on the material with which it 
deals and on contemporary public taste. Florid 
singing is a direct derivative of a certain school 
of opera and, as that school of opera is fading, 
more expressive methods of singing are coming 
to the fore. The very first principal of bel canto, 
an equalized scale, is a false one. With an 
equalized scale a singer can produce a perfectly 
ordered series of notes, a charming string of 
matched tonal pearls, but nothing more. It is 
worthy of attention that it is impossible to sing 

1“The influence exerted by the prima donna on the evolution 
of music has nearly always been reactionary. Even so great 
an opportunist as Handel was driven to threats of personal 
violence in order to secure her submission, and the greatest 
and most original composers have been precisely those who 


treated her with the least consideration.” C. L. Graves in 
Post-Victorian Music; page 283. 


[96] 


The New Art of the Singer 


Spanish or Negro folksongs with an equalized 
scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a 
vocal method of its interpreter quite distinct 
from that demanded by the art-song. 

We are aware at last that true beauty lies 
deeper than in the emission of perfect tones. 
Beauty lurks in truth and expressiveness. ‘The 
new art of the singer should develop to the high- 
est degree the significance of the text. Calvé 
once said that she did not become a real artist 
until she forgot that she had a beautiful voice 
and thought only of the proper expression the 
music demanded. 

Of the old method of singing we may be sure 
of the persistence of only one quality in the late 
twentieth century, and that is style. The per- 
formance of any kind of music demands a knowl- 
edge of and a feeling for its style, but style is 
about the last thing that a singer ever studies. 
When, however, you find a singer who under- 
stands style, there you have an artist. 

Style is the quality which endures long after 
the singer has lost the power to produce a pure 
tone or to contrive accurate phrasing, the quality 
that makes it possible for an artist to hold his 
place on the stage long after his voice has be- 
come partially defective or, indeed, has actually 
departed. It is a knowledge of style that ac- 


[97] 


The New Art of the Singer 


counts for the long careers of Marcella Sembrich 
and Lilli Lehmann,! or of Yvette Guilbert and 
Maggie Cline, for that matter. It is a knowl- 
edge of style that makes De Wolf Hopper a fine 
artist in his interpretation of the music of Sul- 
livan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, 
indeed, with barely a shred of voice, have man- 
aged to maintain their eminent positions on the 
stage for many years through a knowledge of 
style. I might mention in this connection Victor 
Maurel,? Max Heinrich,? Antonio Scotti,* and 
Maurice Renaud. 

A singer may be born with the ability to pro- 
duce pure tone (I doubt if Mme. Melba learned 
much about tone production from her teachers), 
she may even phrase naturally, although this is 
more doubtful, but the acquirement of style is 
an arduous and tedious process and one which 
generally requires specialization. Style is elu- 
sive. A sensitive auditor, a good critic, will rec- 
ognize it at once, but very few can define it with 
any exactitude. Nevertheless, it must be fairly 
obvious to the careful listener that Olive Frem- 


1Born November 24, 1848, this remarkable woman is still 
singing at the age of seventy-six. 

2 Died, 1923. 

3 Died 1916. 

4On January 2, 1924, Scotti appeared as Scarpia in a gala 
performance of Tosca to celebrate his twenty-fifth consecutive 
season at the Metropolitan Opera House. 


[98] 


The New Art of the Singer 


stad is more at home in the music dramas of 
Gluck and Wagner than she is in Carmen and 
Tosca, and that Marcella Sembrich is happier 
when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart inter- 
preter she has had no peer in the past three 
decades) than when she is singing Lakmé. 
Mme. Melba sings Lucia in excellent style, but 
she probably could not convince us that she knows 
how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know 
she has never tried to do so. A recent example 
comes to mind in Maria Marco, the prima donna 
of The Land of Joy company, who sings Span- 
ish music with irresistible effect, but on one occa- 
sion when she attempted Vissi d’arte she was 
transformed immediately into a second-rate Ital- 
lan singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily full 
of grace and meaning, had become convention- 
alized. 

If this quality of style which, after all, only 
means an understanding of both the surface man- 
ner and underlying purpose of a composition and 
an ability to transmit this understanding across 
the footlights, is of such manifest importance in 
the field of art-music, it is doubly so in the field 
of popular music or the folksong. A foreigner 

1 According to no less an authority than Cecil J. Sharp, the 
peasants themselves differentiate between the two, and devote 
to each a special vocal method. In English Folksong, he writes: 


“But, it must be remembered that the vocal method of the 
folksinger is inseparable from the folksong. It is a cult which 


[99] 


The New Art of the Singer 


had best think twice before attempting to deliver 
a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a Polish 
song of a popular or folk nature. Strangers, 
customarily, do not meddle in such matters, al- 
though we have before us at the present time the 
interesting case of Ratan Devi.‘ It is a question, 
however, whether Ratan Devi would be so much 
admired if her songs and their traditional man- 
ner of performance were more familiar to us. 

On our music hall stage there are not more 
than ten singers who understand how to sing 
American popular songs, which, as I have said 
elsewhere, constitute America’s best claim to a 
participation in the art of music. It is very dif- 
ficult to sing these well. ‘Tone and phrasing 
have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a 
question of style. Elsie Janis, a clever mimic, a 
delightful dancer, and possibly the most deservy- 
edly popular artist on our music hall stage, is not 
has grown up side by side with the folksong, and is, no 
doubt, part and parcel of the same tradition. When, for in- 
stance, an old singing man sings a modern popular song, he will 
sing it in quite another way. ‘The tone of his voice will change 
and he will slur his intervals, after the approved manner of 
the street-singer. Indeed, it is usually quite possible to detect 
a genuine folksong simply by paying attention to the way it is 
sung.” 

1An Englishwoman who gives concerts of Hindu songs, 
mostly, to be sure, art-songs, but so greatly do they differ from 


occidental songs that their manner of interpretation is a special 
study in itself, 


[ 100 || 


The New Art of the Singer 


a good interpreter of popular songs. In this de- 
partment she cannot be compared with Bert Wil- 
liams, Blanche Ring, Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, 
May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Cecil 
Cunningham, Fannie Brice, or Marie Cahill. I 
have named nearly all of the good ones.1. The 
spirit, the conscious liberties taken with the 
scores, for the vaudeville singer must elaborate 
his own syncopations, as the singer of early opera 
embroidered on the score of the composer, are 
not accidents that just happen. ‘To acquire them 
demands any amount of work and experience 
with audiences. None of the singers I have 
named is a novice. Nor will you find novices 
who are able to sing Schumann and Franz lieder, 
although they may be blessed with well-nigh per- 
fect vocal organs. 

Still the music critics, with a curious persist- 
ence, continue to adjudge a singer by the old for- 
mule and standards: Has she an equalized 
scale? Has she taste in ornament? Does she 
overdo the use of portamento, messa di voce, 
and such devices? How is her shake? FEtc., 
Etc. But how false, how ridiculous, this is! 
Fancy the result if new writers and composers 
were criticized for failing to conform to the old 

1 Written in 1918. I have made no attempt to bring this 


list down to date, although, of course, other names might now 
be added. 


[ ror |, 


The New Art of the Singer 


laws.! Creative artists always smash these an- 
cient tablets and it does not seem to me that inter- 
preters need be less progressive. Acting changes. 
Judged by the standards by which Edwin Booth 
was assessed, John Drew is no actor. But we 
have become aware at last that it is a different 
kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant, ex- 
travagant, and intensely emotional, something 
quite different from real life. ‘The present craze 
for counterfeiting the semblance of ordinary ex- 
istence on the stage will also die out, for the 
theatre is not life and representing life on the 
boards, except in a conventionalized or decora- 
tive form, is not art. Our new actors, with our 
new playwrights, will develop a new and fantastic 
form of expression which will supersede the pres- 
ent fashion. Rubinstein certainly did not play 
the piano like Chopin. Presently, a virtuoso will 
appear who will refuse to play the piano at all 
and a new instrument will be invented without a 
tempered scale so that he may indulge in all the 
subtleties between half-tones which are denied to 
the pianist. 

It is all very well to cry, Halt! and Who goes 
there? but you can’t stop progress any more than 
you can stop the passing of time. ‘The old tech- 
nique of the singer breaks down before the new 
technique of the composer and the musician with 


2So they are, my son, but not for long. 


[ 102 | 


~The New Art of the Singer 


daring will go still further if the singer will but 
have the courage to follow. Would that some 
singer would have the complete courage to lead! 
But do not misunderstand me. The road to 
Parnassus is no shorter because it has been newly 
paved. Indeed, I believe it to be longer. Caf- 
farelli studied six years before he made his début 
as ‘‘the greatest singer in the world,” but Mary 
Garden is still studying, although she has been 
before the public for eighteen years. The new 
music drama, combining, as it does, principles 
from all the arts, is all-demanding of its inter- 
preters. The new singer must learn how to 
move gracefully and awkwardly (Thais and San- 
tuzza), how to make both fantastic and realistic 
gestures (Snegourotchka and Louise), always 
unconventional gestures, because conventions 
stamp the imitator. She must peer into every 
period, glance at every nation. Every nerve cen- 
tre must be prepared to express any adumbration 
of plasticity. Many of the new operas, Carmen, 
La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call 
for interpretative dancing of the first order. 
Madama Butterfly and Lakmé demand a knowl- 
edge of national characteristics. Pelléas et Mé- 
lisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue exact abso- 
lutely distinct enunciation. Monna Vanna and 
Tristan und Isolde require acting of the highest 
poetic and imaginative range. 


[ 103 ] 


The New Art of the Singer 


It is a question whether certain singers of our 
day have not solved these problems with greater 
success than that with which they are credited. 
Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she 
never had a teacher, that she would not trust her 
voice to a teacher. The enchanting Yvette prac- 
tises a sound by herself until she is able to pro- 
duce it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver 
it without an interrupting breath, and is there a 
singer on our stage more expressive than Yvette 
Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little bari- 
tone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost 
invariably in making the effect she sets out to 
make. She is, indeed, a living rebuttal to the 
statement often made that unorthodox methods 
of singing ruin the voice. Ruin it for perform- 
ances of Linda di Chamounix and La Sonnam- 
bula very possibly, but if young singers sit about 
saving their voices for these operas they are 
more than likely to die unheard. It is a fact that 
good singing in the old-fashioned sense will help 
nobody out in Elektra, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, 
Pelléas et Mélisande, or The Nightingale. Cast 
Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, 
or Mme. Galli-Curci to sing in one of these lyric 
dramas and the result would be deplorable. 

We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of 
what vocal expressiveness may become. Such 
torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor 


[104 ] 


The New Art of the Singer 


Chaliapin + have been procaciously excoriated by 
the critics. Until recently, Mary Garden, who 
of all artists on the lyric stage is the most nearly 
in touch with the singing of the future, has been 
regarded by those who sit in high places as a 
charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once 
called her the “Queen of Unsong.” Well, per- 
haps she is, but she is certainly far better fitted to 
cope with the artistic problems of the modern 
music drama than such Queens of Song as Mar- 
cella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be. It 
has occurred to me that Unsong may be the name 
of the new art. 


April 18, 1918. 


1 When he visited this country in his prime in 1907-8. When 
he returned in 1921, he was unanimously saluted as the greatest 
living lyric artist. 


[105] 


Variations on a Theme by Have- 


lock Ellis 


I 


The note-books of an artist always make in- 
teresting reading. ‘These ideas, incidents, de- 
scriptions, these jottings down against the treach- 
ery of memory, which some day may fall into 
their proper places, often exhibit, when published 
naked, a more spontaneous grace than finished 
work. ‘The later books of Arthur Symons are 
little more than note-books, fugitive impressions, 
shadows of ideas. ‘Therein lies the secret of 
their charm. Samuel Butler’s Note-Book, which 
has been published since his death, is a treasure 
house of thought and wisdom. One day it oc- 
curred to Havelock Ellis that he had collected 
more notes than he could ever conveniently find 
occasion to use, and he filled a book with them, 
Impressions and Comments, a delightfully stim- 
ulating volume, one of this author’s best, brim- 
ming over with pictures and running commen- 
tary... Herein one may find discussions of Sir 


1In 1921, Mr. Ellis published a second series of Impressions 


[ 106] 


Variations on a Theme 


Richard Burton, Romanesque architecture, vege- 
tarianism and vivisection, the significance of the 
body, William Blake, Jacobean furniture, obscur- 
ity in style, Jules de Gaultier, crowd psychology, 
Bovarism, the symbolism of the apple, the Bay- 
eux tapestry, flowers, the decline in the birth 
rate, and Granville Barker. Here is indeed a 
book which rewards any chance reader who flips 
open the pages. Picking it up for five minutes 
or an hour, I have never failed to discover en- 
joyment in it. 

Recently, I came upon the following passage: 
“T have often noticed . . . that when an artist 
in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up 
a pen and writes, he generally writes well, some- 
times even superbly well. Again and again it 
has happened that a man who spent his life with 
a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen 
at their own weapon. . . . It is hard indeed to 
think of any artist in design who has been a bad 
writer. The painter may never write, but when 
he writes, it would almost seem without an 
effort, he writes well. . . . And then, for con- 
trast, think of that other art, which yet seems 
to be so much nearer to words; think of 
musicians !”’ 
and Comments. Also, had not this paper been written before 


they were issued, there would have been reference here to 
George Saintsbury’s A Scrap Book and A Second Scrap Book. 


[107 | 


V artations on a Theme 


II 


Why is it that musicians cannot write? I asked 
myself, for it needed only a half-moment’s reflec- 
tion to convince me that Mr. Ellis was right, al- 
though he does not attempt to explain the phe- 
nomenon. ... Wagner is the first musician- 
writer to come to mind, for whether he could or 
not, Wagner certainly did write. He wrote not 
only the texts for his lyric dramas, but also count- 
less papers, manifestoes, explanations, arguments, 
etc., most of which have been carefully collected 
and which Mr. William Ashton Ellis has ren- 
dered to us in eight volumes of faithful, if not 
very distinguished, English prose. Several col- 

lections of letters and the posthumous Life make 
a formidable total. Indubitably, priceless facts, 
brilliant ideas, withal somewhat incoherently and 
contradictorily expressed, lie buried in this mass 
of matter. Biographers have found this mate- 
rial useful; music critics occasionally turn to it 
for information; others generally leave it alone. 
Wagner, indeed, was always at a disadvantage 
when he wrote in words. Even the plays rise to 
no inspired heights without the music. Compare 
the direct and moving music of the love scene in 
the second act of Tristan with the metaphysical 
sentiments which flow from the lips of the guilty 
pair. Wagner’s prose works, with their equivo- 


[108] 


by Havelock Ellis 


cations, their ponderous and opaque phraseology, 
their individual and very bad German, would 
seemingly resist translation, but Mr. Ellis wres- 
tled with the task, accomplished it, and even 
emerged to praise Wagner’s style, praise which 
has found no echo. ‘The Life, of course, should 
have been a masterpiece; as a matter of fact, it 
is far from being a failure. Autobiography, 
even at its worst, is possibly the most enthralling 
form of literature. But compare the sparkling 
chapters of Benvenuto Cellini with the halting, 
obscure, and deliberately untruthful pages in 
Richard Wagner’s account of his life and you 
will feel, somehow, that you have been cheated. 
And yet Wagner probably had more to tell than 
Cellini. The frank account of the Wesendonck 
affair, the full details of his ménage with the vir- 
gin king, a glowing narrative of his capture of 
Cosima von Bulow, in themselves would have 
supplied the materia)yfor a remarkable triptych 
in the manner of George Moore’s Hail and Fare- 
well, but Wagner could not put it down. He did 
not know how to write, and there was too much 
that he desired to conceal or gloss. James 
Huneker, Catulle Mendes, and a dozen others 
have done it better. 

Gluck’s preface to Alceste scarcely gives him 
claim to serious consideration as a writer. Mo- 
zart’s letters, which are best perused in the vol- 


| 109 | 


Variations on a Theme 


ume of excerpts compiled by Friedrich Kerst, 
contain many passages of interest to the music 
student, but they cannot be regarded as litera- 
ture. Their style, the translator assures us, is 
‘careless, contradictory, and sprawling.” Bee- 
thoven certainly knew nothing of literary art. 
Schubert and Weber remained ignorant of it. 
Poor Chopin knew enough to stick to music. 
Paul de Musset replied to George Sand’s Elle et 
Lui with another roman a clef defending his 
brother, but when Lucrezia Floriani appeared, 
Chopin contented himself by answering it on the 
piano. Mendelssohn’s prose, exposed to us in 
his numerous published letters, is as sentimental 
as his music, and not nearly so pretty. 
Jean-Philippe Rameau, composer and inventor 
of the system of the “fundamental bass,’”’ wrote 
several books: ‘Traité de l’harmonie réduite a 
ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722), Nouveau 
systeme de musique théorique (Paris, 1726), 
Génération harmonique (Paris, 1737), and Code 
de musique practique (Paris, 1760). I have 
not attempted to read these books, but J. E. Mat- 
thew! says of them: “It must be admitted that 
the style of Rameau is greatly wanting in clear- 
ness, so that some resolution is called for in read- 
ing his works.” Grétry’s Mémoires, published 


1In The Literature of Music; Elliot Stock; London; 1896. 
[110] 


by Havelock Ellis 


in Paris in 1797, make more amusing reading, 
but scarcely rank as literature. 

Offenbach’s account of his trip to America is 
the work of a fifth-rate journalistic hack, cer- 
tainly not worthy of a man whose music has been 
compared to champagne. Saint-Saéns is ponder- 
ous enough in prose; his books remind me of the 
bassoon figure in the middle of Beethoven’s Fifth 
Symphony. Gounod is insufferably sentimental. 
Anton Rubinstein was a great pianist and an in- 
different composer, but his autobiography is even 
worse than his music. Rimsky-Korsakoff, in his 
Chronicle of My Musical Life, exhibits himself 
as utterly unskilled in the practice of writing; his 
book owes its position to the fact that he had 
something to write about. We see very little of 
the artist who created Carmen in the letters of 
Bizet. Alfred Bruneau, a composer of the sec- 
ond class, is a music critic of the third. Vincent 
d’Indy’s César Franck is a scholarly piece of 
work which serves its purpose, but it is in no re- 
spect a literary masterpiece. It could be read 
only by a musician. What an opportunity Mas- 
senet missed in his Souvenirs! What a career 
the man had! The book, however, is note- 
worthy neither for revelations of character nor 
for inclusion of pertinent incident. It is writ- 
ten in very mediocre French; even the spelling is 


[111] 


V artations on a Theme 


bad. I recall Geraldine ‘‘Farar.” Hugo Wolf, 
in 1884, and for the following three years, acted 
as music critic for the Vienna Salonblatt. Ernest 
Newman says, “He wrote singularly well,’ but 
the excerpts and summaries that he offers us in 
evidence of this prowess are not very convincing. 
If Wolf’s skill as a song writer is not as great 
as Mr. Newman would have us believe (he 
places him above Schubert) it may be said with- 
out fear of contradiction that as a writer of 
prose he is little read even by musicians. 

Cyril Scott is a facile composer of pretty music, 
the importance of which it would be a mistake 
to overestimate. Scott has also published five 
volumes of poetry and a volume of translations 
from Stefan George and Baudelaire. The titles 
of his books are: The Shadows of Silence 
and the Songs of Yesterday, The Grave of Eros 
and the Book of Mournful Melodies with 
Dreams from the East, The Voice of the Ancient, 
The Vales of Unity, and The Celestial After- 
math, A Springtide of the Heart, and Far-Away 
Songs. A. Eaglefield Hull, in his somewhat 
emotional book on Cyril Scott, devotes an entire 
chapter to this poetry, as he explains that Scott 
at times believes himself to be greater as poet 
than as composer. We learn via Mr. Hull that 
in The Garden of Soul-Sympathy the composer 
rhapsodizes “‘in soul-knit ‘gladness,’ and harmoni- 


[112] 


by Havelock Ellis 


ous visions of wondrous colour move majestically 

over the ear.” Um, perhaps. Here is an ex- 
] ’ 66 9 

ample of Mr. Scott’s “poetry”: 


“Sounds of colourless dreams, of strange vagueness 
telling: 

Immaculate music, heralding the life of sighs, 
Bells across the lone lassitude, rising, rolling, endlessly 
swelling 
Over the wasteland—solitude lost in the clear chaotic 
skies.” + 


It may be noted that Mr. Scott is troubled with 
a mania for alliteration. Such other instances as 


‘‘mournful melodies,’ ‘‘shadows of silence,’ ‘‘a 


far-off flute has faded,” ‘‘dreamful daffodil,” 
“ambient arms,” ‘‘future fiends,” dribble through 
his work. It is perhaps a coincidence that Mr. 
Scott’s alphabetical position on the poetry shelf 
lies half-way between that of Laurence Hope and 
that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 

In prose Mr. Scott has written a book called 
The Philosophy of Modernism. For a chap- 


1In a paper printed on page 16 of A Musical Motley (John 
Lane; London; 1919), Ernest Newman makes the interesting 
statement that “the defects of his poetry are unmistakably those 
of his later music . . . he commits just the same fallacy in verse 
that he sometimes commits in his music—he mistakenly imagines 
that a vision not clearly seen by him in the first place can be 
imposed upon the reader, in spite of its obscurity and its lack 
of outline, by means of resonant and parti-coloured diction.” 


[113 | 


V artations on a Theme 


ter or two he presents some interesting ideas, 
though clothed in a style which in no sense could 
be described as literature. His essay on Percy 
Grainger is really significant. Then he maun- 
ders through an attack on the critics, which is nei- 
ther clearly thought nor clearly expressed, con- 
taining such gems of opinion as this: “All the 
same, it is a noteworthy fact that the great spirit- 
ual geniuses and adepts of the world have never 
condemned and denounced their fellow-creatures 
or the works of their fellow-creatures: and to take 
one sublime instance—Jesus of Nazareth,”’ etc., 
etc., etc. Cyril Scott is not one of the great 
composers and I would not have lingered so long 
over his case were it not for the fact that he of- 
fers one of the most typical examples of the mu- 
sician as writer. 

William Wallace, the composer of Villon and 
other tone-poems for orchestra, has written a 
book called The Threshold of Music which, I 
have been assured, is a good book, but, although 
it has been lying around my garret within easy 
reach for at least two years, I have never been 
able to read it.1 Edward MacDowell’s lectures, 
delivered at Columbia University, collected in a 
volume entitled Critical and Historical Essays, 
might best be described by the convenient epithet 
piffe, pedantic piffe at that. It is only fair to 


1 Nor have I yet (1924) ! 


[114] 


by Havelock Ellis 


state that MacDowell himself was not responsi- 
ble for their publication, and probably would 
have been violently opposed to it.t 

There are, however, certain notable exceptions 
to my theorem. Berlioz was a good writer. 
He might have emerged a famous figure if he 
had simply given us his Mémoires, and his criti- 
cism is stylized and expert, sparkling with biting 
phrases and trenchant words. In A ‘Travers 
Chants, Les Grotesques de la Musique, Les 
Soirees de l’Orchestre, his collected journalism 
in short, he wielded a delightfully nervous pen. 
His prose, indeed, is better on the whole than his 
music. Perhaps this is the explanation of his 
power in this direction. It is really a pity he 
turned to tone. Schumann, too, was far from 
being a bad writer, although he by no means 
stands in a class with Berlioz in this respect. 
Still his writing is simple and natural, radiating 
a certain happy enchantment. Occasionally, in- 
deed, the man lights on a sublime phrase. Nev- 
ertheless, even his Traumerei is better than all 


1 Musicians, as a rule, are even satisfied to set bad librettos 
when they write operas because they have no true appreciation 
of good poetry or good drama. Most opera books rank very low 
under the head of literature and some of the greatest operas have 
been composed to the worst books. Weber, for instance, found 
inspiration in Oberon, and Mozart made masterpieces of Don Gio- 
vanni and The Magic Flute, while Verdi lavished some of his 
best music on the texts of La Forza del Destino and I] Trovatore. 


[115] 


V artations on a Theme 


of the two volumes of his collected prose works. 
The indefatigable Liszt found time for many 
matters in his long life: love affairs, piano play- 
ing, composing, transcribing, pushing Wagner 
towards success, producing Berlioz’s Benvenuto 
Cellini at Weimar, and even for the writing of a 
number of books. None of these can be consid- 
ered a literary masterpiece, but the Life of 
Chopin 1 contains passages of great charm. To 
James Huneker the most eloquent page describes 
‘‘an evening in the Chaussée d’Antin, for it dem- 
onstrates the Hungarian’s literary gifts and feel- 
ing for the right phrase. ‘This description of 
Chopin’s apartment ‘invaded by surprise’ has a 
hypnotizing effect on me. The very furnishings 
of the chamber seem vocal under Liszt’s fanciful 
pen.’ Personally, I prefer the pages devoted to 
the polonaise. Liszt’s book on the Gipsies, too, 
is engaging, although one is permitted to dis- 
agree with the facts. 

And now we come down to a modern musi- 
cian-writer, Claude-Achille Debussy. Curiously 
enough, this French composer was rather an 
adept with the pen. He had a penetrating sense 
of irony and he was not above epigram. In 
1901 he became music critic for the Revue 


1 Liszt told Frederick Niecks that the enlarged edition of his 
Chopin was actually written by the Princess Wittgenstein. See 
Programme Music, page 315. 


[116] 


by Havelock Ellis 


Blanche. Two years later he held the same posi- 
tion on Gil Blas. In 1903 he went to London to 
write his impressions of Wagner’s Tetralogy for 
this paper. Passages from his reviews have be- 
come bywords. Witness the following: “How 
insufferable these people in helmets and wild- 
beast skins become by the time the fourth eve- 
ning comes round. Remember that at each and 
every appearance they are accompanied by their 
damned leit-motive. “There are some who even 
sing it themselves. It is as if a harmless lunatic 
were to present you with his visiting card while 
he declaimed lyrically what was_ inscribed 
thereon.” ‘This was one of the earliest pricks in 
the weaknesses of the Wagner bubble. Here is 
more Debussy iconoclasm: he calls Gluck a 
“pedant,” Bach “that worthy man,” Beethoven 
“a deaf old man,” Berlioz ‘‘a monster,” César 
Franck ‘“‘a Belgian,’’ Massenet ‘‘our most notori- 
ous master.’’ Of the songs of Schubert he says, 
“They are inoffensive; they have the odour of 
bureau drawers of provincial old maids, ends of 
faded ribbon, flowers for ever faded and dried, 
out of date photographs! Only they repeat the 
same effect for interminable stanzas and at the 
end of the third one wonders if one could not 
set to music our national Paul Delmet.” ‘One 
stumbles on Mendelssohn” in Schumann’s Faust; 
Grieg’s music gives Debussy ‘‘the charming and 


[117] 


V artations on a Theme 


bizarre sensation of eating a pink bonbon stuffed 
with snow;” Saint-Saéns’s Henry VIII is “a 
grand historical opera.’ All this is witty and 
some of it is sound. However, according to 
J. G. Prod’homme, Debussy did not write every- 
thing he signed. This critic ascribes an article 
entitled Enfin Seuls! which appeared in 1915 in 
S.I.M. under Debussy’s name, to a disciple, and 
he also informs us that the score for d’Annun- 
zio’s Martyre de Saint Sébastien was only finished 
on the day agreed upon by the collaboration of 
other disciples, very familiar with the Debussy 
manner. 

On these four men? any case for musicians as 
writers of prose must be rested. Berlioz, it 
must be admitted, stands the test. Schumann 
and Liszt as authors would be completely forgot- 
ten (are, indeed, more or less forgotten) were 
it not for their music. Debussy’s criticisms have 
not even been collected in book form, although 
doubtless they will be.? 


1'The appearance in 1919 of Ethel Smyth’s Impressions that 
Remained, and a year or so later of her Streaks of Life, makes 
it almost imperative to put this Englishwoman at the head of 
the list of the musician-writers. I have never heard any of 
her music, but as a composer she is not generally awarded an 
important position. 

2In 1921, after Debussy’s death, under the title of Monsieur 
Croche, Antidilettante, certain of his papers, completely denuded 
of their malice, were collected and published by Dorbon-Ainé. 


[118] 


by Havelock Elhs 
III 


And now let us pass on to the painters. Mr. 
Ellis himself reminds us that ‘‘Leonardo, who 
was indeed great in everything, is among the few 
great writers of Italian prose. Blake was first 
and above all an artist in design, but at the best 
he had so magnificent a mastery of words that 
beside it all but the rare best of his work in de- 
sign looks thin and artificial. Rossetti was draw- 
ing and painting all his life, and yet, as has now 
become clear, it is only in language, verse and 
prose alike, that he is a supreme master. Fro- 
mentin was a painter for his contemporaries, yet 
his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while 
the few books he wrote belong to great litera- 
ture, to linger over with perpetual delight. Po- 
etry seemed to play but a small part in the life 
of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand today by 
the side of his drawings and marbles. Rodin has 
all his life been passionately immersed in plastic 
art; he has never written and seldom talks; yet 
whenever his more intimate disciples, a Judith 
Cladel or a Paul Gsell, have set down the things 
he utters, they are found to be among the most 
vital, fascinating, and profound sayings in the 
world. 


The publisher avers that the composer saw the first proofs. In 
that case he must be held responsible for the denaturalization. 


[119] 


Variations on a Theme 


‘Even a bad artist with the brush may be on 
the road to become a good artist with the pen. 
Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried to 
be a painter before he became a supreme tragic 
dramatist, and to come down to modern times, 
Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists with 
the pen, had first been poor artists with the 
brush. . . . The list of good artists and bad art- 
ists who have been masters of words, from Vasari 
and earlier onward, is long. One sets down at 
random the names of Reynolds, Northcote, Dela- 
croix, Woolner, Carriere, Leighton, Gauguin, 
Beardsley, Du Maurier, Besnard, to which 
doubtless it might be easy to add a host of 
others.” 

Quite easy; that of Whistler, for example, of 
whom Max Beerbohm writes in Yet Again: 
“He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way, 
perfectly; and his way was his own, and the se- 
cret of it died with him. . . . His style never fal- 
ters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever 
blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear 
vocal cadence. . . . Read any page of The Gen- 
tle Art of Making Enemies and you will hear 
a voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures 
in it... . Thére are in England, at this mo-~ 
ment, a few people to whom prose appeals as an 
art; but none of them, I think, has yet done jus- 
tice to Whistler’s prose. None has taken it with 


[ 120 | 


by Havelock Ellis 


the seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. 
When a man can express himself through two 
media, people tend to take him lightly in his use 
of the medium to which he devotes the lesser 
time and energy, even though he use that medium 
not less admirably than the other, and even 
though they themselves care about it more than 
they care about the other. . . . Had Rossetti not 
been primarily a poet the expert in painting 
would have acquired long ago his present pene- 
tration into the peculiar value of Rossetti’s 
painting.” 

There can be no personal plaint in this essay, 
although Max Beerbohm himself is ‘‘a man who 
can express himself through two media,” for no 
one, I dare say, has attempted to imply dissatis- 
faction in this case with either form of expres- 
sion. Max’s delicate and fantastic sense of 
caricature plays as happily through The Happy 
Hypocrite, A Christmas Garland, and Zuleika 
Dobson as it does through his drawings of 
the Rentrée of Mr. George Moore into Chelsea, 
Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric, and Mr. 
Joseph Pennell thinking of the old ’un. He 
turns from one art to the other with equal facil- 
ity. Like Blake and Rossetti he has made his 
two careers run parallel. Du Maurier, also, was 
sib to these. ‘To be sure, he began to write late 
in life and after he had produced Peter Ibbetson 


[ 121 | 


V ariations on a Theme 


he devoted less attention to the social drawings 
on which he had founded so brilliant a career in 
Punch. Nevertheless, he illustrated his own 
novels, and who can think of Peter, of Trilby, of 
Svengali, without thinking of Du Maurier’s 
drawings, so close was the intimacy between his 
two pens? Aubrey Beardsley, too, ran his twin 
talents side by side, although he gave himself 
more whole-heartedly to his drawing. Yet the 
fragment Under the Hill indicates a sure genius 
for a special kind of fantastic writing, as special 
in its way as his painting, and wholly analogous 
to it in spirit. Jacques Blanche since his youth 
has been both a prolific writer and a prolific 
painter. His fame as a painter has perhaps 
outdistanced his fame as a writer because of the 
celebrity of his models. He has painted very 
nearly every person of importance who has vis- 
ited Paris during the past thirty years from 
George Moore to Nijinsky. Probably the best 
of his paintings are the self-portrait in the Uffizi 
at Florence and the picture of the artist Thaulow 
and his family which hangs in the Luxembourg 
Gallery at Paris. On the whole Blanche writes 
better than he draws; his essay on Degas is 
probably the best yet written. Wyndham Lewis, 
too, turns from canvas to copy-paper with infinite 
ease; so does Gordon Craig, while Santiago Rusi- 


[122] 


by Havelock Ellis 


nol, the Spaniard, divides his time between paint- 
ing and writing plays.* 

Often, however, as Mr. Ellis has suggested 
was the case with Thackeray and Hazlitt, the 
bad painter takes to writing. “Thomas Hardy, 
for example, began his career as an architect, an 
allied art, and he has used his knowledge of the 
technique of this art very concretely in his books. 
This author even went so far as to illustrate his 


1Many more names might be added to this list; that, for 
example, of William de Morgan, who turned late in life from 
the designing and manufacturing of pots and tiles to the writ- 
ing of fiction. A writer in the London Times has said of him: 
“In 1922 De Morgan is known as a highly individual author 
who had been a potter. In 1952 he will be recognized as the 
greatest ceramic artist Europe has produced and whose books 
remain to picture the times and places he worked in.” Vachel 
Lindsay illustrated his own book, Going to the Sun. When 
Mr. Lindsay left college he studied at the Art Institute in Chi- 
cago with William M. Chase, and, in New York, with Robert 
Henri. Robert Louis Stevenson made wood-engravings for an 
early book of his. Sherwood Anderson and William Vaughan 
Moody, on the other hand, seem to have taken up painting 
after they had become known as writers. This was also the 
case with A.E., who found he could express certain ideas in 
colour that could not be expressed in words (Imaginations 
and Reveries, page 60). Other names to be noted are those 
of Edward Lear, Jean de Bosschére, Arthur Davison Ficke, 
John Lafarge, Max Weber, Rockwell Kent, E. E. Cummings, 
Maurice Sterne, John Dos Passos, Oliver Herford, Laurence 
Housman, Howard Pyle, Philip Thicknesse, Ralph Barton, 
Kahlil Gibran, Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, 


and Lee Simonson. 
[ 123 | 


V ariations on a Theme 


own Wessex Poems.t George Moore was a 
painter in his youth, and it was while he was 
studying art in Paris that he imbibed much 
of the atmosphere that is so essential a part of 
his books. To this phase of his life we owe such 
works as The Confessions of a Young Man 
and Memoirs of My Dead Life, but could such 
a passage as the description of the trees in A 
Story-Teller’s Holiday have been written by any 
one but a painter? I hardly think so. Hol- 
brook Jackson tells us that Bernard Shaw as a 
boy never wanted to write. He wished to draw, 
and Michelangelo was his boyish ideal. Gautier 
had the intention of becoming a painter when he 


1QLucian was apprenticed to a sculptor. Ouida was a 
painter, withal a bad one. However, she once wrote to her 
friend, Mrs. Huntington, that she was a better painter than 
writer. William and Henry James studied painting with La- 
farge. Arnold Bennett dabbled in art for five years in Paris. 
On inspecting his work, Pierre Laprade, the French water- 
colourist, remarked, ‘Monsieur, you have three times too much 
cleverness, and your work is utterly without interest.” Never- 
theless one of Bennett’s paintings was used to illuminate the 
cover of one of his novels. Booth Tarkington said once to 
an interviewer, “First I intended to be an artist and not a 
writer,’ and O. Henry made a similar remark. Stacy Aumon- 
ier was once a painter. W. B. Yeats, originally intending to 
follow his father’s example and become a painter, went to art 
school in Dublin. Rudyard Kipling illustrated his own Just 
So Stories. Robert W. Chambers and Roland Pertwee were 
once painters. Samuel Butler was not only a painter but a 


composer as well! 
[124 | 


by Havelock Ellis 


first went to Paris. He entered the studio of 
Rioult for a period. ‘‘He had the painter’s 
eye,’ writes Huneker, ‘‘the quick retentive vision, 
the colour sense, above all the sense of composi- 
tion.” The creator of Une Nuit de Cleopatre 
was certainly a painter, and when Fokine ar- 
ranged this picture-poem as a Russian ballet he 
had but to follow the suggestion of the painter- 
poet. Huysmans was a descendant of a long 
line of Dutch painters, one of whom, Cornelius 
Huysmans of Mechlin, has a certain fame among 
the lesser landscape artists of the great period. 
Huneker writes: ‘‘Joris-Karl Huysmans should 
have been a painter; his indubitable gift for form 
and colour were by some trick of circumstance 
transposed to literature.’ Remy de Gourmont 
called him an eye. His description of the car- 
cass of a cow hanging outside a butcher shop is 
certainly the work of a painter: ‘‘As in a hot- 
house, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the 
carcass. Veins shot out on every side like the 
trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work ex- 
tended itself along the body, an efflorescence of 
entrails unfurled their violet-tinted corollas, and 
big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white, 
against the red medley of quivering flesh.” But 
it seems unnecessary to particularize: A Re- 
bours, La Cathédrale, La-Bas, all are painted 


[125 | 


Variations on a Theme 


from cover to cover. Octave Mirbeau painted 
in his moments of leisure, and so great an artist 
as Claude Monet looked upon his brush-work 
with favour. He owned a large collection of 
pictures by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, 
Van Gogh, Rodin, and others, which have been 
sold since his death. Examine again the descrip- 
tion of the garden in Le Jardin des Supplices and 
you will discover how he turned his other talent 
to account. With some writers, indeed, the 
analogy between writing and painting becomes 
perfectly clear. It is so with Gautier and Huys- 
mans. Beerbohm says of Whistler, ‘Yes, that 
painting and that writing are marvellously akin; 
and such differences as you will see in them are 
superficial merely.” It is obvious, too, that 
Joseph Hergesheimer approaches his task from 
the point of view of a painter. He selects and 
describes exactly as an artist in design might se- 
lect and describe. He turns to his palette for a 
touch of cobalt blue or yellow ochre exactly as a 
painter might turn to his palette. This charac- 
teristic of Hergesheimer is so marked that sey- 
eral sagacious reviewers have noted that Java 
Head and The Three Black Pennys are to all in- 
tents and purposes painted. ‘The facts in the 
case are that Hergesheimer began his career as a 
painter, painted, indeed, for several years before 
he began to write at all. 


[126] 


by Havelock Ellis 
IV 


Inspiration, as it affects the artist, is a subject 
I do not approach without the proper amount of 
humility. Either it is something mystic, some- 
thing entirely beyond human ken, something “‘ec- 
static,’ as Arthur Machen would have it, or else 
it must be regarded as a ludicrously practical 
quality. In The Cream of the Jest, Mr. James 
Branch Cabell shows us with withering irony how 
a middle-aged, pudgy, greyish-haired, common- 
place sort of man, whose conversation seemingly 
never rises above the most banal level, derives 
the inspiration for the most fantastic romance 
from his equally commonplace wife and the 
broken cover of a cold-cream jar. ‘he mystery 
of the procedure is emphasized by the fact that 
The Cream of the Jest is sufficiently scandent, 
although in style, manner, and matter it is con- 
tradictory to a degree with which no satisfactory 
comparison comes readily to mind. Mr. Cabell, 
however, in his own way, possibly comes nearer 
to solving our present problem than any one else. 
For here, perhaps, we have our first glimmer of 
understanding. ‘To put it simply, Mr. Cabell’s 
Felix Kennaston depends on his wife, the cover 
of the cold-cream jar, and straggling, downright 
stupid conversation about the weather, for his in- 


spiration. In Arthur Machen’s The Hill of 
[127] 


Variations on a Theme 


Dreams, the author-hero, Lucian Taylor, evolves 
a complete and mystic comprehension of all the 
manifestations of sex from the accidental em- 
brace of a farm girl. ‘The novelist, the painter, 
are thus reduced to models, however far-fetched 
and ridiculously inappropriate the models may 
appear to be in the light cast by the finished work. 
No doubt George Sand loved all her lovers, but 
somewhere in the back of her head lurked a 
realization that their ultimate purpose was to 
supply copy. Some one once asked Maurice 
Maeterlinck what had been his inspiration for the 
creation of Pelléas et Mélisande and his reply 
was, ‘I was writing a piece that suited my wife.” 
Cecil Forsythe, in his book, Nationalism in 
Music, educes the interesting theory that a great 
sea-power never produces great musicians, but 
that authors and painters flourish under trium- 
phant mercantile, social, and political régimes. 
Painters and writers extract their material 
from the world. They must mingle with men, 
see and understand life, no matter how far re- 
moved from life their finished art may be. Art, 
it may be stated categorically, is certainly not a 
reproduction of nature, and yet without nature, 
or some human aspect of it, the painter and 
writer are helpless. Perhaps you have never 
seen a Monet hay-stack in a real field, but unless 


[ 128 ]. 


by Havelock Ellis 


such an object as a hay-stack existed, unless the 
sun had lighted that hay-stack, Monet would 
have chosen another subject. It is not essential 
or important that Leonardo’s Monna Lisa should 
exactly reproduce the effect of the model, but if 
no woman had ever breathed in this world the 
picture never could have been painted. Machen 
detects his ideal quality of ecstasy raised to the 
highest degree in Homer, Rabelais, and Cer- 
vantes, all men of action and wide experience. 
He points out, indeed, that one of the principal 
reasons [The Pickwick Papers is not as great as 
the Odyssey is because Dickens was brought up 
in Camden Town. It was not carelessly then that 
Remy de Gourmont called Huysmans an eye, and 
his dictum that whatever is deeply thought is 
well written is certainly just. Havelock Ellis 
adds that whatever is deeply observed is well 
said. The artist in design, he continues to point 
out, is by the very nature of his work compelled 
to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is 
never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in 
a morass, or run after a mirage. So, when he 
takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, 
he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, 
precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of nature. 

The musician, whose art is the most mystic, the 
most profound, the most “‘ecstatic’’ of any, sim- 


[129 | 


Variations on a Theme 


ply because it deals with clang-tints and not with 
more definite symbols,! is not, as Cecil Forsythe 
has shown us, inspired by great deeds, by politi- 
cal confusion, by mercantile progress, by social 
intercourse. War never inspires great music, 
and England and America have produced less 
good music than Finland and Scandinavia, not to 
speak of Bohemia and Italy! The great Bee- 
thoven wandered alone, and he wrote some of 
his finest music after he became stone-deaf. ‘The 
musical artist, indeed, shut up in a garret, may 
derive his masterpiece through an orphic process 
of introspection. There is no need for him even 
to read; an illiterate composer is a possible fig- 
ure. ‘The song, the fugue, the sonata have ab- 
solutely no analogues in the world of Nature,” 
writes W. H. Hadow. ‘Their basis is psycho- 
logical, not physical, and in them the artist is in 
direct touch with his idea, and presents it to us, 
as it were, first hand. Given sound as the plastic 
medium, Music asks nothing more: it creates its 
subjects by the spontaneous activity of the mind.” 
And W. F. Apthorp remarks: “The bonds 
which hold Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry fast 
to Nature are far tougher and of more inexorable 
grip than any connection discoverable between 
Nature and Music. . . . We may safely assert 


1Every good musician, as a matter of fact, speaks a dis- 
tinct language of his own. 


[130] 


by Havelock Ellis 


that, though a certain modicum of Realism, or 
Truth to Nature, is indispensable to the artistic 
status of Poetry, Painting, or Sculpture, Music 
can perfectly well do without it; also that such 
modicum of Realism—when present in Music— 
cannot be regarded as any true measure of her 
artistic status.” 

It may be regarded as a significant fact that 
the four composers whom I previously selected 
as types of the fairly successful musician-writer 
all resorted to this ‘‘modicum of realism” in their 
music. Every one of them was what is known as 
a literary composer. Every one of them wrote 
program music. Every one of them leaned on 
nature, books, and painting for his inspiration. 
Not only was Schumann’s Carnaval and a great 
deal more of his piano music so inspired; at least 
two of his symphonies had a definite starting 
point somewhere outside music itself. Berlioz 
and Liszt‘ are notorious cases. It is only neces- 
sary to recall the titles of Berlioz’s symphonies, 
Fantastique, Romeo and Juliet, Harold in Italy, 
or of Liszt’s tone-poems (a form which he in- 
_ vented), Les Préludes, Tasso, Mazeppa, etc., to 
realize that although music was the end to these 
men it was seldom the means. With Debussy 


1 Frederick Niecks writes of Liszt: “Except that it is more 
logical, his musical style is a pretty exact likeness of his 


literary style.” 
[131] 


Variations on a Theme 


it was the same: |’Aprés-midi d’un faune had its 
foundation in Mallarmé; La Mer, Nocturnes, 
Iberia, in nature herself. It may be generally 
observed, indeed, that musicians who use the pen 
to write prose or poetry, usually go outside music 
itself to search for the inspiration for their music. 
This is as true of Richard Wagner, Cyril Scott, 
and Edward MacDowell as it is of Liszt and 
Berlioz. 

But what about rhythm? What about the so- 
called musical quality in good literature? In 
The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde says: ‘“‘Since 
the introduction of printing and the fatal de- 
velopment of the habit of reading amongst the 
middle and lower classes there has been a tend- 
ency to appeal more and more to the eye and 
less and less to the ear, which is really the sense 
which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should 
seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure 
it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. 
Pater . . . is often far more like a piece of 
mosaic than a passage in music. We, in fact, 
have made writing a definite mode of composition 
and have located it as a form of design. The 
Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing 
simply as a means of chronicling. Their test 
was always the spoken word in its musical and 
rhetorical relation. ‘The voice was the medium 
and the ear the critic. . . . When Milton could 


[132 | 


by Havelock Ellis 


no longer write he began to sing. Who could 
match the measures of Comus with the measures 
of Samson Agonistes or of Paradise Lost or Re- 
gained? When he became blind he composed 
as everybody should compose, with the voice 
mecere ny ; 
This is all very well; perhaps the voice was 
once the medium of composition; perhaps the 
Greek musicians could compose in words as well 
as tone. We know very little about them. 
Nowadays, in Wilde’s own phrase, ‘‘we have 
made writing a definite mode of composition and 
have located it as a form of design.” ‘There are 
certainly writers of today who make an especial 
effort to write prose which will read aloud well. 
I believe that Henry James dictated certain of 
his novels with this idea in mind. George 
Moore, too, has taken to dictating. But the 
rhythmical quality we note in writing is perhaps 
nearer to the rhythmical quality we note in paint- 
ing than to that we note in music. Balance and a 
sense of proportion, light and shade, all these 
_ qualities are as instinctive to a writer as they are 
to a painter. He places a word, as the painter 
places an object or a point on his canvas, where it 
may catch the light and offer contrast to another 
word or phrase. Balance, light and shade, sense 
of proportion, are all part of the musician’s 
jargon, too. Nevertheless, even if the rhythmi- 


[133 ] 


Variations on a Theme 


cal quality we note in music is identical with the 
rhythmical quality of prose or poetry, it must be 
remembered that the musician creates rhythm 
with pure tone, sound, whereas in any good prose 
or poetry sense and definite meaning must play 
their part. Most of us are unlike Mme. de Staél 
who delighted in the melody of verse, demanding 
nothing more. She would read a favourite speci- 
men and declare, ‘“That is what I call poetry! 
It is delicious, and so much the more so because 
it does not convey a single idea to me!” 
Probably the best and truest reason, however, 
why musicians cannot juggle words is definitely a 
puritanic reason. Of all artists the musician is 
the only one who can express himself freely. In 
a casual paper, James Huneker once observed, 
‘Because of its opportunities for the expansion 
of the soul music has ever attracted the strong 
free sons of earth. It is, par excellence, the art 
masculine. The profoundest truths, the most 
blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within 
the walls of a symphony, and the police none the 
wiser.’ The painter even less than the writer 
can reproduce all that he really sees. Nor can 
the sculptor do more than the painter. These 
artists, then, find themselves free, unrestricted in 
the medium of words, because hitherto they have 
observed and felt deeply so much more than they 
could express on canvas or in marble. ‘The mu- 


[134] 


By Havelock Ellis 


sician, on the other hand, feels bound and tied 
when he is forced to express himself in words. 
He cannot say as much (nor can he say it as 
vaguely) as he can in his own music. If a law 
be passed as a pendent to the now celebrated 
Eighteenth Amendment (and very probably it 
will be), making it a criminal offence to mention 
vodka or absinthe or even beer in a book, or to 
paint a picture in which people may be seen to be 
drinking, the musician may still compose bac- 
chanals and brindisi; he may be as abandonedly 
Dionysiac, as intoxicated and as intoxicating as 
he desires. Nobody is going to prohibit per- 
formances of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. 
Nobody will arrest Vincent d’Indy for disrobing 
a tune in Istar. The cream of the jest is that 
our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, 
was originally a drinking song! . 


February 21, 1919. 


[135] 


On the Relative Difficulties of 
Depicting Heaven and Hell 


in Music 


Beginning with the eighteenth century and ex- 
tending down through our own time, heaven and 
hell have exerted a powerful sway over the imag- 
ination of the musician. It would appear, at 
first glance, that the most abstract of the arts 
could express to us more satisfactorily than 
poetry, painting, or sculpture the symbolism in- 
herent in the names of these post-death king- 
doms. Heaven suggests goodness, nobility, sub- 
limity, glory, simple faith, aspiration, charity, 
brotherly love, and, in the minds of composers, 
perhaps because of the mistranslation of the 
names of obscure Hebrew instruments of which 
we have no pictorial conception, these qualities 
are best expressed concretely by means of harps 
and trumpets. MHell, on the other hand, which 
suggests vice, ugliness, deceit, and defeat, is gen- 
erally associated with snarling bassoons and rat- 
tling drums. Curiously enough, for there can 
be nothing inherently wicked about music, it is 
with hell rather than heaven that composers gen- 


[136] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


erally have achieved better results; and the no- 
blest music is not specifically concerned with para- 
dise. The Symphony in C minor, of which it is 
unnecessary to name the composer, Schubert’s 
Symphony in C major, which has only been as- 
sociated with heaven through Schumann’s adjec- 
tival comment, Or sai chi l’onore, and the final 
scene of Die Walkie were all no doubt inspired 
by God in the deepest religious sense, but the 
composers were making no attempt to picture to 
us the streets of pearl, the mighty chryselephan- 
tine throne, or the winged supernaturals who are 
said to play harps in the air. A real heaven in 
Opera or tone-poem is quite likely to remind a 
musician of the key of C major, the tonic and the 
dominant, and the diatonic scale, whereas hell 
and the devil seem to insist on five or six sharps 
or flats, esoteric scales, and a daedal disregard 
for exoteric rhythms. The conclusion of the sec- 
ond act of Hansel und Gretel furnishes an excel- 
lent typical example of what usually happens in 
music when the composer is concerned with 
heaven. Humperdinck here is satisfied, with the 
aid of transparencies, coloured lights, and state- 
lily tripping angels + bearing gilded palm leaves, 

1 Mr. Pepys’s experience with angel music in the theatre is 
unique and should be recorded: “Went to see the Virgin and 
Martyr, it is mighty pleasant; not that the play is worth much, 


but it is finely acted by Beck Marshall. But that which did 
please me beyond anything in the whole world, was the wind 


[137] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


to transfigure and glorify a tune which would 
form an appropriate part of the service at a 
Protestant Sunday School and which dramati- 
cally is probably quite in keeping with the Prot- 
estant Sunday School ideas of the two babes in 
the forest. It may be said, however, with its 
unimaginative succession of tonic and dominant 
chords and plentiful arpeggios, to represent one 
of the weakest moments in the score. Arpeg- 
gios, by the way, are seemingly an essential ac- 
companiment to anything heavenly. It is not 
alone Little Eva who expires to them; even Rich- 
ard Strauss invokes their aid for his balefully 
banal heaven music in his tone-poem, Death and 
Transfiguration, an episode which sends some of 
us away from the concert hall fully determined 
never to do any good in this world for fear we 
may be consigned to listen to such vapid music all 
our immortal lives. Heaven, indeed, must be a 
dull place to inspire such saccharine chords in the 
composer of the acescent and biting Elektra. 
Again, in The Legend of Joseph, an angel steps 
our way to a tune which suggests that Strauss is 
not at his best when thinking of heaven. Nor is 
Mascagni who, in Iris, introduces us to a Japa- 
nese paradise, via a lotus-flower route, much more 
musique where the angel comes down; which is so sweet that 
it ravished me; and, indeed, in a word did wrap up my soul, 


so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been 
when in love with my wife, that I could think of nothing else.” 


[133] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


successful. With the naive simplicity of The 
Creation’ and for the thundering, God-fearing 
music of The Messiah I have more sympathy, 
and of all heavenly music I do not believe better 
exists than the Dance of the Angels in Wolf- 
Ferrari’s Vita Nuova. ‘There is a test for great 
art, and you may apply it equally to Paul Verlaine 
or to Shakespeare, in that it treats of the sublime 
with simplicity and of the simple with sublimity. 
This minuet, scored for harps, piano, and kettle- 
drums, bringing to mind a divine fresco of pre- 
Raphaelite angels, of daisy-speckled green fields, 
of deep blue skies reflected in lakes of still deeper 
blue, circled by ilexes and cypresses, is indeed 
celestial in its simplicity, as poignant a simplicity 
as that of one of the poems of Sagesse. It sug- 
gests the simple faith of its composer and it be- 
gets faith in its listeners. There is gnosis in this 
music. Gluck, too, knew the secret; Gluck, 
above all others, knew the secret, but Gluck was 
inspired by the pagan heaven of the Greeks, a 
more esthetic idealization than the heaven of 
the Christians. In all opera I cannot recall a 
more simple, a more touchingly serene page, than 
the music of the scene of the Elysian Fields in 
Orfeo. The first and unbelievably lovely dance 

1 Haydn told Griesinger, his biographer, that in one of the 
oldest of his symphonies the ruling idea was how God spoke 


with a hardened sinner, and begged him to mend his ways, 
but without making any impression! 


[139] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


of the happy spirits in F major, ‘‘which,”’ Vernon 
Lee assures us in one of the most mood- 
compelling of her essays, ‘‘seems, in its even 
flow, to carry the soul, upon some reedy, willowy 
stream, into the heart of the land of the happy 
dead,” is immediately pursued by an exquisite 
flute melody to which, if we are not disturbed by 
the action on the stage (and it is often well to 
cover one’s eyes) we may fancy the filmiest 
of sylphs floating lazily through the ether. The 
song of the Happy Shade enhances this mood of 
enchantment and even the entrance of Orpheus 
does not break the spell, which continues to hold 
us in its power until the descending curtain shuts 
from our ears the divine chorus which closes the 
scene. ‘The singing of Christian angels can 
never rival that of this marvellous pagan choir. 
The preceding scene of Furies exhibits Gluck’s 
talent for demoniacism. How persistently they 
scamper and riot! How tremendous is their 
marmorean and terrible No! ‘This naive, but 
substantial, tonal tapestry suggests Orcagna’s 
fresco, The Triumph of Death, in the Campo 
Santo at Pisa much more definitely than Liszt’s 
Todtentanz, which is intended as a musical trans- 
mutation of the painting. 

In the music of Gluck we are assuredly near 
the heart of true beauty which, after all, may be 


1 Orpheus in Rome, in Althea. 


[140] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


the real God, the actual heavenly kingdom. Ideas 
differ, however. In 1665, Fr. Arnoulx, Canon of 
the Cathedral of Riez in Provence, published at 
Rouen a book, now very rare, entitled Du para- 
dis et de ses merveilles, ou est amplement traicté 
de la félicité éternelle et de ses joyes. After de- 
scribing the sights of heaven, he turns to the 
pleasures of the ear: “If the glory of the pic- 
ture is all that one can desire, also the ear is 
charmed by melodious music, pleasant harmony, 
gentle murmurings, soft and beautiful voices. 
There is a director; there are singers and musi- 
clans in abundance; there are thousands of mil- 
lions of beautiful voices which sing in harmony, 
observing very perfectly all the rules of music. 
The director is Jesus Christ; the singers are the 
angels, the blessed, happy angels. Of these 
there are three bands, and each of these bands, 
in turn, is divided into three choirs: the Cheru- 
bim, the Seraphim, and the Thrones sing  so- 
prano; the Dominations and the Principalities 
sing alto; the Powers and the Virtues sing tenor; 
the archangels and the angels in the lowest choirs 
sing bass; even the saints come to sing with these. 
Jesus Christ gives the key to all, and intones the 
motet, which is new. With this celestial music 
and so many melodious voices of different kinds 
there is yet, for the entire perfection of the scale, 
the sound of the harp, of the flute, of viols, of 


[141 | 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


the spinet, of the lute, and all other kinds of in- 
struments which marvellously tickle the delicacy 
of our ears.” 

Music of hell is usually associated with his 
kaisership the devil. Once even, it is related, on 
the authority of a composer, the devil himself 
wrote a tune; this is Tartini’s Devil’s Trill 
Sonata which violinists often play to this day. 
M. Lalande, in his Voyage d’un Francois en 
Italie, tells the story, which he avers he had di- 
rectly from ‘Tartini, and Dr. Burney repeats it. 
Michael Kelly informs us, in an autobiography 
not entirely to be relied upon in other respects, 
that Nardini, a pupil of Tartini, assured him that 
the tale was correct in every detail. One night 
in the year 1713, it appears, Tartini dreamed 
that he had made a contract with the devil, who 
promised to be at his service on all occasions; 
indeed, in the dream, the musician’s new servant 
anticipated all his wishes and fully satisfied his 
desires. Ultimately, the two became so familiar 
that Tartini presented the fiend with his violin in 
order to ascertain what kind of musician he was; 
when, to Tartini’s astonishment, he heard the evil 
one play an air, so beautiful in itself and per- 
formed with such taste and skill that it surpassed 
all the music he had ever heard before in his life. 
Tartini awoke in a state of feverish excitement 


and delight, and seized his fiddle in the hope of 
[142 | 


Heaven and Hell 1n Music 


reproducing the music he had just heard, but the 
arch fiend had departed and his music with him! 
Nevertheless, Tartini sought pen and music- 
paper and immediately composed the sonata 
which bears the devil’s name. It is the best of 
Tartini’s works, but so far inferior has its com- 
poser declared it to be to the music which he 
heard in his dream that he said he would have 
smashed his instrument and abandoned the art 
for the remainder of his life could he have sub- 
sisted by any other means. 

It was thoughtful of the devil to improvise his 
sonata in the style of the eighteenth century. 
What if it had occurred to him to dash off Leo 
Ornstein’s Opus 31? Could Tartini have re- 
membered the notes and set them down? I 
doubt it. As it is, we have Tartini’s word for 
the fact that the music as performed was infinitely 
more extraordinary than his transcription of it. 
Memory is treacherous at best, and to remember 
a whole sonata, taking in at the same time the 
virtuosity of the devil and the glamour of his 
presence, which must have shared interest with 
his playing, must be adjudged a remarkable feat. 
Broad, sweeping, sensuous melodies, and rapid, 
dashing cascades of notes, to be played with devil- 
ish abandon, alternate in this music. If Tolstoy 
had been more familiar with musical literature 
he might have found this composition more to 


[143] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


his purpose than the harmless Kreutzer Sonata. 
In one section the leading notes are trilled and in 
the cadenza the violinist is offered an opportunity 
to trill to his heart’s content: hence probably the 
title. The work is difficult and we are forced to 
the conclusion that the devil must have been an 
exceptionally fine fiddler. 

Philip Hale assures us, as a matter of fact, 
that when the devil played the fiddle his bowing 
was so vigorous that the dancers kept on dancing 
until they died. Miss Jeannette d’Abadie saw 
Mrs. Martibalsarena dance with four frogs at 
the same time at a Sabbat personally conducted 
by Satan, who played in an amazingly wild 
fashion. His favourite instrument was the fid- 
dle, but he occasionally performed on the bag- 
pipe. The good monk Abraham a Sancta-Clara, 
according to Mr. Hale, once meditated on the 
devil’s taste in musical instruments: ‘‘Does he 
prefer the harp? Surely not, for it was by the 
harp that he was driven from the body of Saul. 
A trumpet? No, for the brilliant tones of the 
trumpet have many times dispersed the enemies 
of the Lord. A tambourine? Ah, no, for Mir- 
iam, the sister of Aaron, after Pharaoh and his 
host were drowned in the Red Sea, took a tam- 
bourine in her hand and with all the women 
about her praised and thanked God. A fiddle? 
No, indeed, for with a fiddle an angel rejoiced 


[144 | 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


the heart of St. Francis. I do not wish to abuse 
the patience of the reader, and so I say that noth- 
ing is more agreeable to Satan for accompaniment 
to the dance than the ancient pagan lyre.” 

In 1858-59, Liszt composed two orchestral 
paraphrases of episodes from the Faust of Nico- 
laus Lenau, and in the second of these, The 
Dance in the Village Tavern, more commonly 
known as the Mephisto Waltz, the devil plays 
the violin, while Faust, in sensual excitement, 
prances away with a black-eyed peasant girl. 
John Sullivan Dwight, once a prominent Boston 
critic, held that this music was “‘positively devil- 
ish, simply diabolical . . . it shuts out every ray 
of light and héaven, from whence music sprang.”’ 
Perhaps the spirit of ataraxy is in the air; at any 
rate, today we can listen to this piece without 
trembling. 

Rubinstein’s orchestral poem, Faust, seems to 
lack any reference to the devil, but in his opera, 
The Demon, which until recently, at least, has 
remained popular in Russia, he drew a full length 
portrait of the tempter.1 There are minor 


1Satan is also a character in Rubinstein’s Paradise Lost, 
in which the fiend and a chorus of rebel angels are frequently 
heard to shriek and howl. The orchestral introduction to 
Part III paints the “temptation and the fall.” In Sir Arthur 
Sullivan’s The Golden Legend, Prince Henry of Hoheneck, 
lying sick in body and mind in his castle of Vautsberg on the 
Rhine, has consulted the physicians of Salerno and learned 


[145] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


glimpses of hell in Der Freischiitz and Robert, le 
Diable; in Grisélidis, Massenet turned his atten- 
tion to a bourgeois, boisterous, Gothic, gargoyle 
kind of devil, which he has limned with no little 
humour. ‘The most important air of this amus- 
ing apparition is called Loin de sa femme! An- 
other comedy devil is to be encountered in 
Tchaikovsky’s charming opera, Vakoola; The 
Smith.t. Charles Martin Loeffler, the Alsatian 
composer who resides in Boston or thereabouts, 
has written The Devil’s Villanelle, a tone-poem 
after Maurice Rollinat’s Villanelle du Diable. 
The music follows the verse line by line, word by 
word, while the two refrains, Hell’s a burning, 


that he can only be cured by the blood of a maiden who shall, 
of her own free will, consent to die for his sake. Regarding 
the remedy as impossible, the Prince prepares to die when he 
is visited by Lucifer disguised as a physician. The demon 
tempts the Prince with alcohol, to which he yields in such 
measure that ultimately he is deprived of place and power 
and driven forth as an outcast. ‘Then, of course, a maiden 
offers ‘herself to save him, and he is cured. This happy ending 
is foreshadowed in the prologue, in which Lucifer makes an 
unsuccessful attempt to demolish the Cathedral of Strassbourg. 
The second act of C. Villiers Stanford’s dramatic oratorio, 
Eden, is laid in hell, and Satan naturally plays a prominent 
réle in the ensuing scene which is devoted to the fall of man. 
In 1921, Ludomir Rozycki’s ballet, Pan Twardovski, was per- 
formed at Warsaw. In this pantomime, based on an old Polish 
legend, the devil is the principal mime. 

1 Variously known as Oxana’s Caprice and Cherevichki. 
This opera is based on Gogol’s Christmas Eve Revels. Later, 
Rimsky-Korsakoff composed an opera on the same subject. 


[146] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


burning, burning, and The Devil, prowling, runs 
about, both have their themes. The word crap- 
ule suggests Aristide Bruant’s celebrated ditty 
A la Villette (often sung inimitably by Yvette 
Guilbert) to Mr. Loeffler, and he quotes from it. 
To decorate the word magister he involves the 
Ca Ira and La Carmagnole in a contrapuntal 
fracas. Death plays the fiddle in Saint-Saéns’s 
tone-poem, La Danse Macabre, while skeletons 
click bones and bound about. ‘There is surely 
some devilry in this business. At least one 
American composer, Henry Hadley, has done his 
bit for the devil. His work is a tone-poem, Lu- 
cifer, after Vondel’s five-act tragedy. The mu- 
sic purports to describe the war between darkness 
and the powers of light, until the defeated Lu- 
cifer is cast down into chaos. The Lucifer 
theme has been described as ‘‘sinister, forebod- 
ing.’ The work has been performed in New 
York and Boston, but I have not heard it. 

It is the Faust legend, however, which has prin- 
cipally encouraged composers for considerably 
over a century to go to hell. Many of these 
operas, symphonies, and overtures have disap- 
peared and only musical dictionaries and white- 
haired gatherers of statistics remind us that they 
once existed. Even much of the incidental music 
composed to be performed with Goethe’s tragedy 
has fallen into oblivion. The very names of 


[147] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


Radziwell, Lindpaintner, Beaucourt, de Peelaert, 
Porphire-Désiré Hennebert, F. de Roda, Rietz, 
Henry Rowley Bishop, Louise Angélique Bertin, 
Heinrich Zoellner, Lickl, Karl Eberwein, Louis 
Schloesser, Eduard Lassen, and L. Gordigiani 
have faded away. We do remember Schumann, 
but who knows his Faust music, maugre Mr. New- 
man’s earnest praise? Spohr’s Faust, too, is 
forgotten, Spohr of whom W. H. Hadow once 
wrote, “His whole conception of the art is soft 
and voluptuous, his Heaven is a Garden of At- 
lantis, and even his Judgment Day is iridescent.” 
Weber might have composed a Faust. When he 
was engaged to write an opera for London he 
was offered a choice between this subject and 
Oberon. He chose the latter. Beethoven, too, 
once contemplated the possibilities of the theme. 
Wagner’s Eine Faustouvertire is not performed 
as frequently as the prelude to Die Meistersinger, 
but there are probably few concert-goers who 
have not heard it. Felix Weingartner’s inci- 
dental music for Goethe’s play was performed at 
Weimar in 1908. More recently, a young 
Frenchwoman, Lili Boulanger, who died before 
she had achieved a style, set to music a scene 
from the second part of Goethe’s Faust and 
called the result a cantata, but her devil is be- 


1If Beethoven had written Faust, by Oscar Thompson; 
The Musical Quarterly; Vol. X, page 13. 


[148] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


decked with Wagnerian melodies and harmonies. 
Liszt’s Faust Symphony is certainly with us both 
in spirit and flesh. The third movement is de- 
voted to Mephistopheles. Ernest Newman ob- 
serves that this “section is particularly ingenious. 
It consists, for the most part, of a kind of bur- 
lesque upon the subjects of Faust, which are here 
passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of 
irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective 
way of depicting ‘the spirit of denial’ than mak- 
ing him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, 
in the manner of Boito. The being who exists, 
for the purposes of drama, only in antagonism to 
Faust, whose main activity consists only in en- 
deavouring to frustrate every good impulse in 
Faust’s soul, is really best dealt with, in music, 
not as a positive individuality, but as the embodi- 
ment of a negation—a malicious, saturnine par- 
ody of all the good that has gone to the making 
of Faust. ‘The Mephistopheles is not only a 
piece of diabolically clever music, but the best 
picture we have of a character that in the hands 
of the average musician becomes either stupid, or 
vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt’s music, 
we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles 
of Goethe’s drama.” Mr. Apthorp remarks, 
“One may suspect the composer of taking ‘Ich 
bin der Geist der stehts verneint’ for the motto 
of this movement,” and James Huneker tells us 


[149] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


that “in the Mephistopheles Liszt appears in his 
most characteristic pose—Abbé’s robe tucked up, 
Pan’s hoofs showing, and the air charged 
with cynical mockeries and travesties of sacred 
love and ideals (themes are topsy-turvied a la 
Berlioz). 

At the present day we often hear two Faust 
operas; occasionally, three. Boito, after his 
prologue in which Mefistofele challenges the 
heavenly hosts, ventures no nearer paradise than 
the classical Sabbath scene in which Faust meets 
Helena in a sort of Italianate duet. To me this 
is the unendurable episode of this lyric drama. 
The scene in which Mefistofele twirls the globe 
in his palm while his craven cohorts circle and 
chortle around him is extremely effective, but 
when Chaliapin appears as the spirit that denies 
it is a matter for doubt whether it is the Russian 
bass or Boito who makes the effect. Certainly. 
Marguerite’s death in prison remains the best 
scene, musically speaking, in the drama. Ber- 
lioz, in his ‘‘dramatic legend,” is nearest hell in 
the Song of the Flea, an excellent piece of sar- 
donic ribaldry, although the ride, with its ghastly 
accentuated horse-hoofs beating up from the or- 
chestra, is very wonderful. Ernest Newman 
thinks indeed, that Berlioz’s devil is the only 
operatic Mephistopheles that carries conviction: 
“Fle never, even for a moment, suggests the in- 


[150] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


anely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of 
malicious, saturnine devilry there is plenty in 
him; no one, except Liszt, could compete with 
Berlioz on this ground. But there is much more 
than this in the character. In such scenes as that 
on the banks of the Elbe, where he lulls Faust to 
sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of 
dominion over ordinary things, that takes Meph- 
istopheles out of the category of the merely the- 
atrical and puts him in that of the philosophical.” 
Marguerite’s glorification is a forgettable pas- 
sage, just as Gounod’s attempt at the translation 
of Marguerite is the weakest point in the score, 
but, as no one nowadays ever ventures to sit out 
an opera, it was perhaps clever of Gounod to 
place his heaven scene last so that only the ushers 
and stage-hands may hear it before they extin- 
guish the lights in the theatre. Nevertheless, 
you will no doubt recall the episode, with its 
white-winged supernumeraries rising above the 
housetops to the accompaniment of arpeggios 
and a silly chant, not even the perfumed sanctity 
we have the right to demand of a modern French 
composer. 

Faust, it seems to me, of all conceivable opera- 
tic subjects, cries out for collaborators. It is 
unfortunate that César Franck is dead because 
I think that the Belgian composer and Igor Stra- 
vinsky working together might have evolved 


[151] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


something extraordinary. For César Franck 
came nearer to expressing aspiration and vague 
longing in his mystic music than any other com- 
poser. It is not alone the Rédemption and the 
Béatitudes that shine in blessed light. The D 
minor Symphony is to me one of the finest ex- 
amples of simple sublimity to be found in all mu- 
sic. [his haunting reticulation of tones aspires 
and even reaches beyond aspiration. ‘The ter- 
rible first movement warns us of the Judgment 
Day and then in melting human tones forgives us 
our sins. The allegretto is like a graceful dance 
of angels, the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli, clad in 
robes of mulberry and lilac sewn with threads of 
gold and silver, their halos effulgent in a blue 
light, itself impregnated with golden dust, while 
the hautboys and harps ravish our ears and the 
soaring violins give ample promise of the glory 
of the heavenly choirs. Santa Teresa would 
have loved this music, music mystic and benefi- 
cent at the same time, not the mysticism tinged 
with chypre and verveine and essence of berga- 
mot which makes Debussy’s music a powerful 
stimulant to jaded nerves. César Franck could 
have realized the simple purity of Marguerite 
and he would have carried her triumphantly, 
gloriously, magnificently, through vague Gothic 
arches of tone which would have burst the bound- 


[152] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


aries of any singing theatre and transported us 
to Amiens or Chartres. 

But Papa Franck never could have managed 
the hell scenes of Faust.1 He would have made © 
of Abaddon a truly epicene kingdom, frequented 
by bardashes and catamites. No, for hell we 
should turn to Stravinsky, and what a dashing, 
erratic, spontaneous, discordant devil we might 
expect from him! A devil in quintuple and sex- 
tuple rhythms, a devil decked cap-a-pie with trip- 
lets in sixteenths, and figurations after the worst 
manner of sheol, a delightful, insinuating, firefly, 
marvellous fellow of a fiend, with piccolos, flutes, 
clarinets, hautboys, bassoons, French horns, and 
celestas at his beck and call, a Zamiel with nerve- 
wracking glissandos on the violins and deep, pas- 
sionate, long-bowed, mocking viola notes at his 
command, a Beelzebub with a shower of shud- 
dering octaves and a flood of discordant tenths, 
an Apollyon who could sing bass and tenor and 
a little falsetto, in fact, a regular bing-bang- 
boom hell of a devil in the best Russian Ballet 
manner ! 

Now a Stravinsky devil played against a César 
Franck heaven would create a Faust warranted to 
keep the oldest subscriber to the Opera awake. 


1'When I wrote this I must have forgotten Le Chasseur 


Maudit. 
[153] 


Heaven and Hell in Music 


Even old Nietzsche, could he hear it, would be 
delighted with this nexus of mysticism and nerv- 


ous energy, this combat of the life-force with 
the spirit of God! 


November 18, 1918. 


[154] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


In a recent periodical George Moore,? indulg- 
ing in an imaginary conversation with Edmund 
Gosse,? discussed the advisability of rewriting 
Robinson Crusoe: ‘The first part of the story 
could not be improved, but the end is a sad spec- 
tacle for us men of letters—the uninspired try- 
ing to continue the work of the inspired.” And 
Mr. Moore makes a statement which is all too 
true, that few read on in the book after Crusoe 
leaves the island. So it is on the island that he 
_would have him write his memoirs, dying before 
Friday, “and some admirable pages might be 
written on the grief of the man Friday, inter- 
mingled with fears lest his kindred should return 
and eat him—Friday, not Crusoe; and Friday 
true to his evangelization, would bury Crusoe 


1 George Moore has rewritten many of his own books. Henry 
James rewrote all of his novels and tales that he cared to 
preserve for the definitive edition. On the other hand, Ouida 
believed (and expressed this belief in a paper published in her 
Critical Studies) that once a book was given to the public, 
it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author 
had no longer the right to tamper with it. 

2This conversation is now included in the volume called 


Avowals, 
[155] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


with all the prayers he could remember... . 
Crusoe must not meet with sudden death, rather | 
an accident among the cliffs that would allow him 
to continue his memoirs from time to time. I 
would have the last page of the manuscript relate 
Crusoe’s anxiety for Friday, who he foresees will 
die of grief, and Friday’s last act, the placing the 
manuscript hard by the grave, which would be 
necessary for the completion of the story, for it 
is the manuscript that explains to the captain of 
the next ship that visits the island the presence 
of the skeleton by the grave. ‘The captain’s 
reading the manuscript would have given Defoe 
an opportunity to evoke a new soul, the captain’s. 
How the poor savage must have grieved for his 
saviour and master! ‘Like a dog,’ he mutters as 
he turns the last page.” 

While reading these lines my mind reverted to 
a conversation I once held with the sage of Forty- 
second Street, Oscar Hammerstein, relative to 
his next production of opera. Oscar’s idea was 
that when he again presented opera he should lay 
as violent hands as seemed expedient on the pub- 
lished texts of composers, transposing, rearrang- 
ing, adding, subtracting, in order that the enter- 
tainment might be made more brisk, more ap- 
petizing to the customers. He spoke with par- 
ticular emphasis concerning Aida, in which the 
principal tenor air occurs a few moments after 


[156] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 
the rise of the first curtain, an absurd situation 
for a tenor air in opera, as it is a convention for 
opera-goers not to put in an appearance until the 
second act is well begun. Celeste Aida, there- 
fore, in Oscarian opera was to be sung some time 
during the second or third act. He also had un- 
der consideration a rearrangement of La Forza 
del Destino, which he acknowledged was full of 
pretty tunes but which was handicapped by a pre- 
posterous fable, and he reminded me that when he 
had produced Les Huguenots he had imported 
from his own Victoria Theatre of Varieties a 
wire walker who simply transported the public 
as he threaded his way back and forth on the 
taut steel during the scene laid in a meadow on 
the bank of the Seine, thereby diverting attention 
from the ‘‘dull music,” how Mary Garden, in- 
serted in the tenor role of Le Jongleur de Notre- 
Dame, had made that opera a desirable form of 
entertainment, and again, how Odette Valery, 
plus live vipers and boa constrictors, had almost 
succeeded in making Samson et Dalila endurable. 

The idea allured me, and seemed, at first 
thought, novel. As opera is seldom regarded 
seriously by musicians, there is no reason why it 
should be so solemnly conducted. ‘There are 
times at the Metropolitan Opera House when 
one expects to hear the gong of high mass sound 
or Professor William Lyon Phelps begin to lec- 


[157] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


ture on Browning. Reflecting in this manner, 
my enthusiasm mounted: surely no need to stop 
with Aida and La Forza del Destino. 

The mere announcement, however, that oper- 
atic works of art were to be so tampered with 
would arouse the New York Times to such a 
condemnatory editorial that else only a threat- 
ened encroachment on Central Park could pro- 
voke, and yet, on second thought, I realized that 
this idea of Oscar Hammerstein’s was not en- 
tirely new. He crystallized it into an advertis- 
able slogan, gave it the power to create discus- 
sion, but he did not create it. Scarcely any work 
of art which requires interpretation, play, sym- 
phony, or violin concerto, is ever performed ex- 
actly as it was written, and I think it may be 
safely stated categorically that an opera never is. 

Most conductors have found it expedient to 
modify orchestral masterpieces. I am inclined 
to believe that all of them have. Mozart, 
Haydn, and Beethoven did not write for the 
modern orchestra, and when their music is per- 
formed under modern conditions doubtless some 
liberties should be taken with the text. As a 
matter of fact, it usually is. “The weak orches- 
tration of Chopin’s piano concertos has been re- 
inforced by many pens. If some one with cour- 
age does not inaugurate a similar mode of pro- — 


[153] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


cedure with the Schumann Symphonies? it may 
be predicted with certainty that they will drop 
out of the repertory. Schumann was an amateur 
at instrumentation; he heard these works on the 
piano. To those who rise in horror at this point 
to suggest that such meddling with the work of 
genius is sacrilegious I may be permitted to re- 
ply that any one who prefers to do so may al- 
ways return to the original score. In case im- 
provements are noted in the rearrangements 
probably fewer conductors will avail themselves 
of this privilege. 

H. E. Krehbiel, an honest man with violent 
prejudices, wrote bitterly about one of the finest 
conductors we have had in New York for no 
other reason than that Mahler added a flute here 
or suppressed a kettledrum there. This one- 
sided battle, conducted with considerable din, 


1JIn 1921, Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Or- 
chestra, actually undertook to revise the scoring of Schumann’s 
Rhenish Symphony. Occasionally, to give greater clarity to 
the thought, he even added a measure. He replaced Schu- 
mann’s coda by another in which, however, he utilized the 
composer’s material. He also seized opportunities as they arose 
for contrapuntal embellishment in the various voices. ‘The in- 
struments he added were one additional flute (interchangeable 
with piccolo), oboe (interchangeable with English horn), clar- 
inet, bassoon, two additional trumpets, and, outside Schumann’s 
original list, a bass tuba, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, side 


drum, and tambourine. 
[159] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


would have been ridiculous, even farcical, but 
for the sudden death of the besieged musician, 
which gave to the matter a tragic aspect, some- 
what accentuated by an article which appeared 
in the New York Tribune on May 21, 1911. 
Reread in calmer days, this paper seems rather 
droll, but at the time of its appearance it almost 
broke up homes. Amusing, indeed, is Mr. Kreh- 
biel’s pompous description of the eupeptic audi- 
tors of the Philharmonic Society: ‘He (Mr. 
Mahler) never discovered that there were Phil- 
harmonic subscribers who had inherited not only 
their seats from their parents and grandparents, 
but also their appreciation of good music. He 
never knew, or if he knew he was never willing 
to acknowledge, that the Philharmonic audience 
would be as quick to resent an outrage on the 
musical classics as a corruption of the Bible or 
Shakespeare.” This was an unfortunate com- 
parison. Probably even Mr. Krehbiel himself 
has swallowed without loss of appetite Mr. 
Daly’s corruptions (monstrous, they were, too),} 
Mr. Booth’s corruptions, Mme. Modjeska’s cor- 
ruptions, and Sir Henry Irving’s corruptions. Il 
would be willing, indeed, to lay an even bet that 


1’The reader would do well at this point to open the first 
volume of Bernard Shaw’s Dramatic Opinions and Essays 
(Brentano’s; 1906) at page 160 and read the paper entitled 


Poor Shakespeare! 
[ 160 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


no member of the Philharmonic Society has ever 
seen a Shakespeare play performed as written 
by Shakespeare. The dean gave Mr. Mahler 
credit for too little intelligence. [he Bohemian 
Jew conductor probably was well aware of the 
fact that many of the grandparents of Philhar- 
monic subscribers had assisted at the burning of 
witches and yet he would have been the last to 
advise the survival of this jolly custom. Striv- 
ing to reawaken interest in music which had been 
heard so often, so badly performed, that it was 
received with apathy, he introduced careful al- 
terations, perhaps not invariably well-advised, 
but never thoughtlessly, never for economic rea- 
sons, and never, I should be willing to swear, did 
he obscure a composer’s intention. Rather he 
illuminated it. Permit me to continue to quote 
Mr. Krehbiel to show how far dull pedantry may 
exercise an ancillary function to blind obstinacy 
of opinion: ‘He did not know that he was do- 
ing it, or if he did he was willing wantonly to 
insult their intelligence and taste by such things 
as multiplying the voices in a Beethoven sym- 
phony (an additional kettledrum in the Pastoral, 
for instance), by cutting down the strings and 
doubling the flutes in Mozart’s G minor, by forti- 
fying the brass in Schubert’s C major until the 
sweet Vienna singer of nearly a century ago 
seemed a modern Malay running amuck, and— 


[ 161 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


most monstrous of all his doings—starting the 
most poetical and introspective of Schumann’s 
overtures—that to Manfred—with a cymbal 
clash like that which sets Mazeppa’s horse on 
his wild gallop in Liszt’s symphonic poem. And 
who can ever forget the treatment of the kettle- 
drums which he demanded of his players?” 

Mr. Krehbiel presents a highly flattering por- 
trait of the lay members of the Philharmonic So- 
ciety. I doubt if meddling with the classics, even 
when it is radical, causes these ladies and gen- 
tlemen as keen suffering as he imagines. At any 
rate, this procedure did not begin with Mahler, 
nor did it end with him, and I would like to 
wager that I could introduce salient modifications 
in such frequently performed and popular works 
as the overture to Oberon, Beethoven’s Eighth 
Symphony, and Mozart’s Jupiter without their 
being detected by more than seven or eight per- 
sons in an average Philharmonic audience (and 
this is putting the percentage considerably higher 
than seems justifiable), an audience which might 
include the lynx-eared dean himself who once, 
even with a program before him, levelled a half- 
column of abuse at a man named Prokofieff for 
having composed a piece which the aforesaid pro- 
gram plainly attributed to Vasilenko.* 


1The curious reader may find a complete account of this 
contretemps in,the Musical Courier for December 19, 1918. 


[ 162 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


In one of the “golden periods” of opera no 
respect whatever was paid to the composer. 
When, for example, John Ebers was manager of 
the King’s Theatre in London, the air, Voi che 
sapete, in The Marriage of Figaro, was sung 
variously, on different evenings, by the Countess, 
by Susanna, occasionally even by Cherubino, for 
whom it was written. It was the custom at this 
epoch for singers to do as they pleased by operas. 
When the great Mme. Pasta appeared in Coc- 
cia’s Maria Stuarda “scarcely a single part in 
the piece escaped unchanged,” writes Ebers, “so 
bent were the performers on introducing addi- 
tions for the gratification of their amour propre.” 
De Begnis chose I] Turco in Italia as the vehicle 
for his London début, but all the best parts of 
La Cenerentola were forced into it. 

You may read, also, in historical tables and 
essays, which old gentlemen delight in preparing 
for us, of the character of the numerous operatic 
performances that took place in New York in 
the early nineteenth century, admittedly hodge- 
podges, airs from this and from that, with scenes 
transposed or omitted. We need only to recall 
Manuel Garcia’s celebrated season at the Park 
Theatre in 1825, during which II Barbiere was 
performed twenty-three times. Does any one 
imagine for a moment that Rossini’s musical 
comedy was given as he wrote it? If any one 


[ 163 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


does, Jet him examine the records, where he also 
may discover astonishing details concerning the 
presentation of the other operas offered during 
this season, which derives its magnificence from 
the presence of the elder Garcia and the young 
Malibran in the company. Thereafter, as be- 
fore, on through the Mapleson seasons at the 
Academy of Music, operas were produced with 
due regard for the caprices of prime donne, and 
the pocket-books of impresarii. The ignorance 
of the public was taken for granted. Emma 
Abbott interpolated the Lullaby from Erminie in 
The Mikado and Adelina Patti interpolated 
Home Sweet Home in any opera she happened 
to be singing. To this day you may hear Frieda 
Hempel sing Keep the home fires burning some- 
where in The Daughter of the Regiment. 

This reference to Mme. Hempel has reminded 
me that I cannot recall a single opera in the re- 
pertory of the Metropolitan Opera House which 
has not undergone some change or other, many of 
them very considerable, and almost all of them ad- 
vantageous. However, I prefer to hear and see 
the church scene in Faust given, as it appears 
in the score, after the death of Valentin, rather 
than before, as it is sung in our theatre and al- 
most everywhere else. Valentin’s air, Dio pos- 
sente, was written for an Italian performance of 
the opera in London; it is never sung in Paris, 


[ 164 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


but we hear it in New York, and, as the opera 
is performed here in French, Dio possente be- 
comes Avant de quitter ces lieux. It was for- 
merly the American custom, and a very good 
one too, to omit the ballet; that has been re- 
stored at our theatre, but one of Siebel’s airs and 
Marguerite’s spinning song are never heard. 
Gluck originally wrote Orfeo for a castrato and 
later arranged the part for a tenor.’ In the 
newer version prepared for the Paris Académie 
Royale de Musique, the principal singer, with the 
consent of Gluck, interpolated an air at the close 
of the first act, an air which, until recently, has 
been attributed to a contemporary composer 
named Bertoni, and has been held in disfavour. 
It is certainly not in keeping with the rest of the 
music of this lyric drama, but ‘Tiersot has estab- 
lished the fact that Gluck transplanted it from 
one of his own early operas. However that may 
be, it still remains in disfavour. When Marie 
Delna sang Orfeo at the Metropolitan she sub- 
stituted an air from Echo et Narcisse; Mrs. 
Homer’s custom is to sing the grand air from 
Alceste,? which has the disadvantage of releas- 
ing the trombones before their outburst in the 
furious scene of the second act. Fate played a 
considerable part in relation to modern perform- 


1 Now the réle is sung by a contralto. 


2 Divinités du Styx. 
[165 ] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


ances of The Barber of Seville. The manu- 
script parts of the overture and a trio were lost 
before the work was published; for the first, an 
earlier overture of the composer serves; for the 
second, sopranos substitute, during the lesson 
scene, whatever air or airs suit their voices and 
appeal to their tastes. Patti and Sembrich, in- 
deed, often gave little concerts at this point in 
the opera, always singing three or four songs, 
frequently, seven or eight. Lucia was originally 
regarded as a tenor opera; now we only think 
of it as an excuse for a coloratura soprano to 
debate with a flute. As a result, the last act, 
which belongs to Edgardo, is omitted, and the 
work is terminated with the mad scene. As our 
opera-goers object to arriving at the theatre at 
six-thirty or seven, it has become necessary to cut 
huge chunks out of the Wagner dramas. Some- 
times we are introduced to the Norns in Gotter- 
dammerung, sometimes to Waltraute, but sel- 
dom to both together. Mr. Bodanzky, always 
original in such matters, dropped Alberich. I 
attended his next performance of Parsifal, hop- 
ing to find that the role of Gurnemanz had disap- 
peared. No such luck. When Gluck’s Iphi- 
génie en Tauride was produced at the Metro- 
politan Opera House it was in a German version, 
prepared by Richard Strauss, who had even 
composed the trio with which the opera ended. 


[ 166] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


But the most striking cases of rewriting at 
present on view at the Metropolitan Opera 
House are Boris Godunoff, Oberon, and Le Cog 
d’Or.! 

Besides writing fifteen operas of his own, 
Rimsky-Korsakoff orchestrated The Stone Guest, 
left unfinished by the death of Dargomijski, 
and with the assistance of Glazunoff he com- 
pleted Prince Igor. Another friend of Rimsky- 


1 Anything into which the human element enters is naturally 
uncertain. Conductors not only rewrite and cut operas before 
they perform them; they actually rewrite them during per- 
formance. For the past twenty-five years it has been the 
custom of Tom Bull at the Metropolitan Opera House to hold 
a stop-watch on every act. He has a complete and valuable 
record of the exact time it has taken each conductor to get 
through with an act on each separate occasion. Even the same 
conductor with the same opera with the same cuts varies some- 
what on different evenings. ‘The first night Mr. Polacco con- 
ducted Boris Godunoff he finished the first act three minutes 
later than Mr. Toscanini. There is also a record in Mr. 
Bull’s book of a performance of Samson et Dalila in Phila- 
delphia which was over twenty-five minutes earlier than those 
conducted in New York by Mr. Monteux. No extra cuts had 
been made; it was simply a matter of speedier conducting, 
and, of course, of shorter intermissions. 

In this connection it is interesting to recall that George 
Henschel once wrote to ask Brahms if the metronome marks at 
the head of the several movements of the Requiem should 
be strictly adhered to. “Well—just as with all other music,” 
answered Brahms. “I think here as well as with other music 
the metronome is of no value. As far at least as my expe- 
rience goes, everybody has, sooner or later, withdrawn his 
metronome marks. ‘Those which can be found in my works— 


[ 167 ] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


Korsakoff, Musorgsky, left La Khovantchina 
incomplete at his death. Rimsky orchestrated 
this opera, composing the last pages himself. 
He made several excisions, which later were re- 
stored in a version prepared by Stravinsky and 
Ravel. In relation to this episode Mr. Cal- 
vocoressi writes, ‘‘We can see, thanks to the 
work of Ravel and Stravinsky, that the score 
(published by Rimsky-Korsakoff in 1883) was 
little better than a libel. Rimsky-Korsakoff 


good friends have talked me into putting them there, for I 
myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical 
instrument go well together. The so-called ‘elastic’ tempo is 
moreover not a new invention. ‘Con discrezione’ should be 
added to that as to many things.” 

Singers, too, make many arbitrary changes in scores, some- 
times because a tone is too high, sometimes because it is not 
high enough, sometimes for the same reason which led Rubin- 
stein occasionally to startle academic hearers with cascades of 
false notes, because their memories fail them. Brahms may be 
quoted on this subject also. Because he had a severe cold and 
dreaded a certain high F, George Henschel wrote the com- 
poser asking if he would object if the singer substituted for 
that note another more convenient one. “Not in the least,” 
replied Brahms. ‘As far as I am concerned, a thinking, sensi- 
ble singer may, without hesitation, change a note which for 
some reason or other is for the time being out of his compass, 
into one which he can reach with comfort, provided always 
the declamation remains correct and the accentuation does 
not suffer.” Certain changes of this nature have been made 
so frequently in opera airs that they have become traditional. 
It is no uncommon thing for an ignorant critic to severely 
condemn a singer for restoring the original, but infrequently 


heard, text. 
[ 168 ] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


erred in all good faith. . . . Musorgsky be- 
lieved anything resembling formalism to be fatal 
to art; he was as convinced that Rimsky- 
Korsakoff’s idioms and methods were superflu- 
ously stiff and conventional as Rimsky-Korsakoff 
was convinced that Boris Godunoff and La 
Khovantchina were uncouth and crude.” 
Rimsky-Korsakoff called this doing his duty; 
his intentions were honourable. He also consid- 
ered it his duty to rewrite Boris Godunoff, and 
since that work has been performed extensively 
in the singing theatres of Europe and America 
a constant hum of excited discussion regarding 
this version of the opera has simmered in the 
critical kettle. In a conversation with V. Yas- 
trebtsieff, as reported in the Moscow weekly, 
Musica, June 22, 1903, Rimsky-Korsakoff said: 
“I originally intended writing a purely critical 
article on the merits and demerits of Boris 
Godunoff, but a new revised pianoforte score and 
a new orchestral score will be a more eloquent 
testimony to future generations of my views of 
this work, not only as a whole, but as regards 
the details of every bar; the more so, because in 
this transcription of the opera for orchestra, per- 
sonality is not concerned, and I am only doing 
what Musorgsky himself ought to have done, but 
which he did not understand how to carry out, 
simply because of his lack of technique as a com- 


[169 ] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


poser. I maintain that in my intention to re- 
harmonize and reorchestrate this great opera of 
Musorgsky there is certainly nothing for which 
I can be blamed; in any case I impute no sins to 
myself. ... Only when I have revised the 
whole of Musorgsky’s works shall I begin to be 
at peace and feel that my conscience is clear; for 
then I shall have done all that can and ought to 
be done for his compositions and his memory.” 

Boris was apparently successfully produced at 
The Mariinski Theatre at St. Petersburg on 
January 24 (O. S.) 1874, but the opera did 
not retain its place in the repertory, although it 
was sporadically revived, and it was not pro- 
duced outside of Russia. In 1896, Rimsky- 
Korsakoff’s version was published, and has held 
the stage ever since. 

Of this version, Montagu-Nathan admits Wee 
Rimsky seems to have “‘toned down a good many 
musical features which would have won ac- 
ceptance today as having been extraordinarily 
prophetic.” V. V. Stasoff, the Russian music 
critic, was opposed to the alterations. ‘‘While 
admitting Musorgsky’s technical limitations,” 
writes Rosa Newmarch, “‘and his tendency to be 
slovenly in workmanship, he (Stasoff) thought it 
might be better for the world to see this original 
and inspired composer with all his faults ruth- 
lessly exposed to view than clothed in his right 


[170] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


mind with the assistance of Rimsky-Korsakoff. 
. . . We who loved Musorgsky’s music in spite 
of its apparent dishevelment may not unnatu- 
rally resent Rimsky-Korsakoff’s conscientious 
grooming of it. But when it actually came to 
the question of producing the operas, even 
Stasoff, I am sure, realized the need for practical 
revisions, without which Musorgsky’s original 
scores, with all their potential greatness, ran con- 
siderable risk of becoming mere archeological 
curiosities.” Arthur Pougin falls in with this 
theory, ‘In reality, the music of Musorgsky only 
became possible when a friendly, experienced 
hand had taken the trouble to look over and 
carefully correct it.’”’ James Huneker writes: 
‘‘Musorgsky would not study the elements of or- 
chestration and one of the penalties he paid was 
that his friend, Rimsky-Korsakoff, ‘edited’ Boris 
Godunoff (in 1896 a new edition appeared with 
changes, purely practical, as Calvocoressi notes, 
but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely re- 
mains the work of the composer) and La Kho- 
vantchina was scored by Rimsky-Korsakoff, and 
no doubt ‘edited,’ that is revised, what picture 
experts call ‘restored.’’’ Calvocoressi contents 
himself with this laconic statement: ‘In 1896 
a new edition of Boris Godunoff appeared, re- 
vised by M. Rimsky-Korsakoff. Certain of the 
changes that one remarks in this have a purely 


[171] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


practical end, which is to facilitate the execution; 
others are only motivated by the desire to take 
away from the isolated aspect of the work, to 
render it less disconcerting to the public.” Jean 
Marnold, on the other hand, screams with rage: 
‘He (Rimsky-Korsakoff) changes the order of 
the last two tableaux, thus denaturing at its con- 
clusion the expressly popular essence and the psy- 
chology of the drama. The scene of Boris with 
his children is especially mutilated. Rimsky- 
Korsakoff cuts, at his happiness, one, two, or 
three measures, as serenely as he cuts fifteen or 
twenty. At will he transposes a tone, a half- 
tone, makes sharps or flats natural, alters modu- 
lations. He even corrects the harmony. Dur- 
ing the tableau in the cell of Pimen the liturgical 
Dorian mode is adulterated by a banal D minor. 
The interval of the augmented fifth (a favourite 
device of Musorgsky) is frequently the object of 
this equilateral ostracism. He has no more re- 
spect for traditional harmony. Nearly every in- 
stant Rimsky-Korsakoff changes something for 
the unique reason that it is his pleasure to do so. 
From one end of the work to the other he planes, 
files, polishes, pulls together, retouches, embel- 
lishes, makes insipid, or corrupts. In comparing 
the two scores one can hardly believe one’s eyes. 
In the two hundred and fifty-eight pages of that 


1In Musique d’autrefois et d’aujourd’hui. 


[172] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


of Rimsky-Korsakoff there are perhaps not 
twenty which conform to the original text.” 

Whether or no Rimsky-Korsakoff spoiled his 
friend’s opera I have no personal means of de- 
termining. Original scores of Boris do not, so 
far as I am aware, exist in New York. Appar- 
ently, they do not abound anywhere.t It may, 
however, be offered in extenuation of Rimsky- 
Korsakoff’s act that his version has consistently 
held the stage and has made a tremendous effect 
wherever it has been presented. ‘The original 
work may or may not have surpassed its succes- 
sor, but, at any rate, Boris, as it now stands, is 
one of the most solid, one of the most striking, 
one of the most beautiful works in the current 
repertory. 

The case of Oberon is another matter alto- 
gether. Regarding with greedy eyes the success 
of Der Freischtitz in London, the Director of 
Covent Garden Theatre sought a new work from 


1 After the first edition of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s My Musical 
Life (Knopf; 1923) was on the market, I received a letter 
from Mr. O. G. Sonneck informing me that the original vocal 
score of Boris had reposed in the Library of Congress at 
Washington “for years and years.” No American critic, so 
far as I know, had hitherto been informed of that fact. Cer- 
tainly, in all the protracted discussion that has raged in the 
press over this question, the phrase “the original score is not 
available for examination” has constantly bobbed up. I have 
no present intention of examining this score myself, but any 
one who suffers from curiosity, is apparently at liberty to do so. 


[173] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


Weber. The composer, near death and anxious to 
provide for the future of his family, consented to 
set an English book to music. Two subjects were 
offered him, Faust and Oberon. He chose 
the latter and J. R. Planché prepared the book, 
from time to time sending scenes on to Weber, 
who went to the trouble of learning English so 
that he might the better understand what he was 
writing music for. It was felt that too great a 
strain must not be put upon the appreciatory pow- 
ers of a Covent Garden audience. Difficulties, 
too, presented themselves. ‘The singers in this 
theatre could not act, the actors could not sing. 
As a result of this situation Planché prepared a 
strange opera book with plenty of opportunity 
for a spectacular scene painter (there were some- 
thing like twenty-one scenes in the original ver- 
sion), in which there was a great deal of spoken 
dialogue, much of it allotted to characters who 
never sang a note. With true fatidical spirit 
Weber wrote to Planché, ‘“The intermixing of so 
many principal actors who do not sing, the omis- 
sion of the music in the most important moments 
—all deprive our Oberon of the title of an 
opera, and will make him unfit for all other thea- 
tres in Europe.’ Nevertheless, deeply inspired 
by the subject, Weber completed the work, in- 
tending to rewrite it later for performance in 
other theatres, but he died in London in June 


[174] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


1826, two months after Oberon was produced, 
before he had time to carry out his intention. 
There the matter stood. Weber had com- 
posed what I, at any rate, consider his finest opera 
in a form which made it simply unpresentable 
under any but the original conditions. It is 
therefore no subject for wonder that since that 
day it has seldom, if ever, been performed as writ- 
ten. Huon’s first air proving unsuitable to the 
voice of Braham, the tenor who created the role, 
Weber wrote a new air. In the early German 
performances the original song was restored, and 
it was not long before music was provided for 
the dialogue. Berlioz heard Schroeder-Devrient 
sing Rezia in Paris four years after the London 
production. The Theéatre-Lyrique, under the di- 
rection of Carvalho, mounted the work in 1857. 
In 1860, Sir Julius Benedict arranged an Italian 
version of Oberon for London, adding certain 
numbers from Euryanthe and providing mv- 
sic for the spoken dialogue. Willner, Josef 
Schlaar, and Gustav Mahler are others who have 
made new versions of the work for practical op- 
eratic production. Mahler’s arrangement was 
heard at Cologne and when he was in New York 
he vainly urged Heinrich Conried to produce it 
at the Metropolitan. Up to the year 1918, how- 
ever, no version had been regarded as definitive, 
unless it might have been that of Sir Julius Bene- 


[175] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


dict, which has many disadvantages. Neverthe- 
less, Oberon was a favourite opera in England 
and America during the Victorian era. Tietjens 
sang Rezia and Alboni sang Fatima; later, Pap- 
penheim and Parepa-Rosa sang Rezia (often 
spelled Reiza) and Trebelli sang Fatima. The 
work, however, had never been performed at the 
Metropolitan Opera House until Arthur Bo- 
danzky prepared his version. Aside from the 
lack of a definitive version, if any such lack were 
felt, there were probably many excellent reasons 
for this delay. The opera demands a great 
number of elaborate decorations, including the 
representation of a storm on a rocky coast, fairy 
festivals, and caliph’s banquets. Obviously, ex- 
pense is involved. ‘Then the music exacts, for 
its correct interpretation, not only voices of great 
range, but also consummate art. The part of 
Rezia is beyond the reach of many a dramatic 
soprano, and tenors might sing Edgardo, Ra- 
dames, Canio, and Rodolfo all their lives with- 
out being able to get through the first air of 
Huon. 

Mr. Bodanzky telescoped the text into nine 
scenes, omitting several of the characters whose 
dialogue was spoken and providing music for the 
others. In every instance, this music is built up 
on themes found in the work itself. The final 
chorus, for example, is constructed on the num- 


[176] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


ber, subsequently discarded, which Weber wrote 
for Braham. ‘The result may be regarded as 
generally admirable, for Mr. Bodanzky’s work 
has the desirable effect of knitting together the 
very lovely music of the piece. Oberon assur- 
edly has the ardency of true beauty. The over- 
ture and Rezia’s grand air are both familiar 
in the concert room, but both are heard to more 
advantage in the opera house. For Ocean, thou 
mighty monster, indeed, scenic embellishment is 
more essential than for the final scene of Die 
Walkie, and the overture, with its foreshadow- 
ing of the fairy music, Huon’s chivalric air, and 
the quartet, Over the dark blue waters, comes 
back to memory with renewed force and mean- 
ing after the fall of the final curtain. For my- 
self, | may say that I like Oberon almost as 
much as I like the operas of Gluck and Mozart, 
and a great deal more than I like the lyric dramas 
of Richard Wagner. 

The third rewritten opera in the repertory of 
the Metropolitan Opera House is presented in 
its new form in direct opposition to the intentions 
of the composer and against the protests of the 
composer’s widow. It is amusing to recall that 
the composer was Rimsky-Korsakoff who, after 
his death, has been served as he served others. 
In this instance, however, music and book escape 


1 This is the second instance. Scheherazade was not writ- 


[4974 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


revision. The alterations concern solely the 
manner of interpretation. 

Rimsky-Korsakoff completed The Golden 
Cockerel (given in New York in its French form 
as Le Cog d’Or) in 1907. ‘The censor, justifi- 
ably regarding the book as a satire directed at 
royalty, at first refused to sanction its Russian 
production, and it did not reach the stage before 
the composer’s death in 1908. Later, however, 
it was performed with success in Russia. Some 
time before the summer of 1914, Serge de 
Diaghileff, the director of the Russian Ballet, 
searching for novelties suitable for production 
by that organization in London and Paris, hit 
upon this quaintest and most beautiful of Rimsky- 
Korsakoff’s many operas and, with the assistance 
of Fokine, invented a novel presentation of it. 
This was a performance involving two casts, one 
to sing and the other to act.1_ The singing cast, 
ten as a ballet and the composer’s program for this symphony 
differs in every respect from that of Fokine. 

1If this idea had occurred to Planché all the original dif- 
ficulties in regard to Oberon might have been brushed aside. 
It was not a new idea even in Planché’s day. In Lumley’s 
Reminiscences of the Opera, I find the following: “On the 
English stage, where the double qualities of acting and singing 
were in those days not to be found combined in one person, 
a tenor-lover was introduced to sing the music of Gustavus 
(in Auber’s Gustave III), whilst the part itself was acted by 


Mr. Warde, a tragedian of considerable merit. A similar ar- 
rangement of an operatic work had long before distinguished 


[178] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


together with the chorus, was arranged in uni- 
forms on two tiers of benches placed on either 
side of the stage, leaving the centre of the stage 
free for the ballet to enact the play. Conse- 
quently, after a first gasp of amazement, the spec- 
tators soon accepted the singers as part of the 
decoration and followed with glee the history 
of the silly King Dodon and the amazingly 
naughty and mysterious Queen of Shemakahn. 
The fantastries of the book lend themselves well 
to this manner of treatment and the result was 
a success which surpassed all expectations, a suc- 
cess which was repeated later in New York. 
These three operas, indeed, Boris Godunoff, 
Oberon, and The Golden Cockerel, are as- 
suredly the most delightful works in the current 
(1918-19) repertory of the Metropolitan Opera 
House. I should be the last to point the moral 
herein indicated. “There may, indeed, be some 
operas which do not need rewriting. ‘The fact 
remains that the creative power and a sense of 
the theatre do not always go together. As Sir 


the English version of The Barber of Seville, in which the 
part of Almaviva was enacted by a light comedian, whilst 
an additional character, one Fiorello, sang Rossini’s music of 
the part.” One might go still further back: in Orazio Vecchi’s 
Amfiparnasso, an attempt to convert the Commedia dell’Arte 
into lyric drama, produced at Modena in 1594, the music was 
sung by five singers behind the scenes while the action and speech 
of the actors on the stage was synchronized with the music. 


[179] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


Charles Villiers Stanford so justly remarks, it is 
a mistake to prolong the Elijah after the ascent 
of the fiery chariot. ‘“‘When a piece is over it is 
over.’ ‘This is a lesson Wagner never learned. 
His motto appears to have been, When a piece 
is over it is just beginning. Will some one, I 
wonder, have the courage to lop King Mark’s 
speech off the end of the second act of Tristan? 

But while we are rewriting masterpieces why 
not go into the matter with thoroughness? 
Why not engage J. M. Barrie to write a new 
book for The Magic Flute? Why not employ 
Mr. Belasco to cut and contrive and comb a sin- 
gle opera out of Mefistofele and La Gioconda? 
The idea fascinates me. I should delight in do- 
ing a little snipping and rearranging myself. I 
have a fancy, for instance, for playing Il Trova- 
tore backwards, something like this: 

The opera opens with the scene in the prison 
where the Gipsy, Azucena, has been thrown at 
the instigation of the wicked Count. She and 
Manrico sing the duet, Si la stanchezza, after 
which Manrico obliges with Di quella pira. 
Leonora enters and vainly pleads with the Count 
to spare Manrico, but that one, being a baritone 
and jealous of the tenor’s high C, orders him to 
be put to death at once. ‘The audience, if we 
may take into account the way Di quella pira is 
usually rendered, will be properly grateful, but 


[180] 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 


the horrified Azucena informs the Count that he 
has murdered his own brother. Here the scene 
changes to the tower where Leonora, assisted by 
the spirit of Manrico, looking down from heaven, 
warbles the Miserere. 

The second act opens in the camp. Azucena, 
dragged in, moans her plaintive lament for Man- 
rico, while Leonora, stricken with grief, im- 
mures herself in a convent, from which she is 
abducted by the Count, who learns that Azucena 
has lied about the burned Manrico, her own son 
and not his brother. The act is brought to a 
spirited conclusion by a performance of the anvil 
chorus in which all the principals ecstatically join. 

In the third act, Leonora, hearing a voice in 
the garden of the Count’s palace and in her mad- 
ness fancying it to be the voice of her dear, dead 
Manrico, ventures out into the moonlight. The 
voice, however, proves to be that of the Count 
di Luna, but Leonora has reached such a state 
of indifference that she falls into his arms in 
a magnificent state of bravura, while the Count 
delightedly comes to her aid with a performance 
of Manrico’s music transposed into as comfort- 
able a key as possible. 

Other ideas present themselves. ‘The exam- 
ple of Le Coq d’Or should make it possible to 
continue indefinitely the enormous vogue of Ger- 
aldine Farrar, who might act her roles unre- 


[181 | 


On the Rewriting of Masterpieces 
strainedly while somebody else sings them, and 
if any more American operas are to be produced 
at the Metropolitan Opera House, might I sug- 
gest that Irving Berlin be called in to rewrite 
them? 


January I, 1919. 


[182] 


On Hearing What You Want 
When You Want It 


Reflecting today in my garret, I find myself in 
a melancholy mood. I have searched the con- 
cert announcements in the advertising columns 
of my morning newspaper only to discover that 
I must hear—if I hear anything at all—either 
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or Mozart’s 
Symphony in G minor; either the Coriolan over- 
ture or the overture to Euryanthe; either Cha- 
brier’s Bourrée fantasque (which would be new 
to my ears) or Sibelius’s Finlandia; and, at the 
Opera, I am offered Aida. Now this is a dis- 
couraging state of affairs for a man of tempera- 
ment who would like to order his music as he 
orders his library or his dinner. One is never 
obliged to eat at some one else’s behest, one 
reads according to one’s fancy, but when one 
wants to listen to music one must perforce listen 
to what is being played or else not listen at all, 
unless—and here it is well to admit the futility 
of the qualification—one is Ludwig of Bavaria. 
This afternoon I have a whim to attend a con- 
cert, the program of which shall consist of César 


[183 ] 


On Hearing What You Want 


Franck’s D minor Symphony, Stravinsky’s Le 
Sacre du Printemps, and Debussy’s La Mer. 
Franck’s symphony will, of course, be performed 
some time this winter, but the performance will 
fall on a day on which I have no ambition to 
hear it, and the other pieces will not, in all prob- 
ability, be performed at all. 

My temporary prejudices and tastes in music, 
indeed, seem ever at variance with my opportuni- 
ties. For many years I longed to hear Vincent 
d’Indy’s Istar. ‘The idea of the music disrob- 
ing, as the goddess of the legend disrobed, awak- 
ened my curiosity, a curiosity whetted still 
sharper by the rhapsodies which Philip Hale and 
James Huneker have woven around this inverted 
set of variations. But even curiosity perishes 
with age and on the day when, finally, I saw the 
thing announced, I discovered, to my surprise, 
that all appetite had left me. Nevertheless, on 
this bright winter afternoon, when I should have 
preferred to walk in the park or even to attend a 
moving-picture theatre, I forced myself to enter 
the concert hall. The auditorium was over- 
heated and stuffy; I was surrounded by a crowd 
of hysterical females who had come to see a Rus- 
sian violinist, whose name, in translation, was 
Mike or Alec. I sat through a long program, 
for Istar was announced to close the concert, 
and when at last it was performed, I began idly 


[184 ] 


When You Want It 


to turn over the pages of my book of notes about 
the music, reading the advertisements with an 
interest which I found I could not devote to the 
composition itself. That, in fact, I scarcely lis- 
tened to. ‘This is not a unique experience; it is 
usual. The evenings on which I yearn to hear 
Boris Godunoff they sing L’Amore dei Tre Re 
at the Opera; the afternoons on which I have a 
deep longing to listen to Liszt’s B minor Sonata, 
the Hofmanns and Bauers and Myra Hesses 
are all busy playing Chopin’s. 

This is both confusing and irritating, for taste 
in music changes, especially if you hear a good 
deal of it. J have worshipped at several altars. 
Some of them I return to when I can. ‘The cool, 
sane, classic beauty of Gluck, the gay, sweet- 
sour, tragi-comedy of Mozart, the red blare and 
poster-like dash of American jazz, the pellucid 
harmonies of Debussy, so like the nocturnes of 
Whistler, the refreshing melodies of Arthur Sul- 
livan, are seldom unwelcome, but the days in 
which I enjoy the empty orchestral orgies of 
Richard Strauss, the trumpet blasts of Richard 
Wagner, the fantastic but futile inventions of 
Hector Berlioz, and the thunderbolts of Bee- 
thoven come more rarely. Other intermittent 
humours find me hankering for the ironic acidity 
of the quaintly perverse |’Heure Espagnole, for 
the bombast of Handel, whom Samuel Butler 


[185] 


On Hearing What You Want 


very nearly succeeded in making famous again, 
for Chinese music, even for Grieg’s piano con- 
certo, but seldom do mood and music strike me 
simultaneously. 

There are hours in which the charming mel- 
ancholy and faded sentimentality of Werther 
and Eugen Oniegin, lyric dramas curiously simi- 
lar in feeling, would come as a boon. There are 
nights when Les Larmes, and the Letter Song 
in Tchaikovsky’s opera, would send me sobbing 
from the theatre, for these airs evoke a certain 
artificial Victorian atmosphere of grief more po- 
tently than any book or picture with which I am 
familiar. When ‘Tatjana begins the Letter 
Song, if you are in the mood—and how seldom 
this is!—the key of the play is handed into your 
keeping, the soul of the composition communes 
with your own soul, and a vague sympathy with 
something perhaps alien to your own nature 
takes possession of you. 

Sometimes I am seized with a desire for the 
dance, a craving for a conventional rhythmic ex- 
pression, for, at least, even if one cannot dance, 
one sometimes itches to hear dance music, but 
these will not be the nights on which The Beau- 
tiful Blue Danube, Coppélia, or Beethoven’s 
Seventh Symphony will be played. Der Rosen- 
kavalier would fill the breach, but how often can 
one hear Der Rosenkavalier? 


[186] 


When You Want It 


I have never listened to The Barber of Se- 
ville without enjoying it, and there are times 
when I burn to carry Rossinian explorations far- 
ther, when I perhaps might take delight in Tan- 
credi, with its still delicious, but now never sung, 
Di tanti palpiti, sacred to the memory of Giuditta 
Pasta, and La Cenerentola. Often, indeed, mus- 
ing before the fire in my garret, I wistfully beg 
the gods to put it into somebody’s head to play 
me the tunes I have read about so often, but 
which now I can hear only in my mind’s ear 
through the formality of the printed scores: for 
example, Félicien David’s Le Désert, that ‘‘ode- 
symphonie”’’ which Hector Berlioz hailed as a 
chef-d’ceuvre and which seemingly remained a 
chef-d’ceuvre until the calmly sardonic Auber one 
day remarked, “I will wait until David gets off 
his camel.”’ Either the epigram or the subse- 
quent dismounting killed the piece, for now it is 
never played. But I should like to hear it: 
what could be quainter than Second Empire ori- 
entalism? Would Ingres’s Odalisque come to 
life under the spell of David’s harmonies and 
stand in ivory perfection in some sheik’s harem, 
listening to the call of the muezzin, while the 
camels tramped the desert with their lumbering, 
swaying passing? What of Spontini’s La Ves- 
tale? Would this faded score evoke the spirit 
of Rome, as Gluck’s music evokes the soul of 


[187] 


On Hearing What You Want 


Greece? I can decorate my garret with Victo- 
rian trophies, antimacassars, walnut highboys, 
wall-paper representing Roman temples, beneath 
the columns of which shepherd boys play their 
pipes, while troops of ladies, garbed like Mrs. 
Leo Hunter, embark for Cythera on splendid 
barges. I can examine at my leisure mezzo- 
tints and engravings by John Martin, Richard 
Earlom, Valentine Green, Goltzius, Edelinck, or 
J. R. Smith, and I can enjoy the mellow corn- 
fields and rich velvety forests of George Inness 
whenever I feel in the mood to do so, which is 
not too often. As frequently as I please I can 
take down from my shelves and dip into The 
Monk by M. C. Lewis, Headlong Hall by 
Thomas Love Peacock, The Art of Dining by 
Abraham Hayward, The Truth about Tris- 
trem Varick by Edgar Saltus, or Chandos by 
Ouida. No strange, old-fashioned byway, no 
hidden cranny of painting or literature is denied 
me, but if I were dying of desire to experi- 
ence an audition of Purcell’s Dido and Aéneas, 
Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, Balfe’s The 
Maid’ of Artois, or even Wagner’s Die Feen or 
Puccini’s Edgar, I should expire before the medi- 
cine was proffered me. 

Watteau, Voltaire, Cranach, H. B. Fuller, 
Rodin, and Joseph Hergesheimer stand ready to 
please me whenever I am in the proper temper 


[188] 


When You Want It 


to appreciate their work but, unless I follow 
Ernest Newman’s example—which I am _ not 
likely to do—and purchase a player-piano, I am 
dependent on the whims of the Paris Opéra or 
Mr. Walter Damrosch for the privilege of lis- 
tening to Lully, Couperin, or Grétry. Even Er- 
nest Newman must listen to most of this music in 
transcriptions—transcriptions, which he admits 
in his laudatory book on the subject, have been 
made carelessly enough, for the most part, from 
transcriptions already fashioned for human pian- 
ists, without reference to the orchestral scores, 
which the player-piano, being gifted with more 
than two hands, could more nearly duplicate in 
number of voices if not in timbres—and, in re- 
lation to such music as has not yet been cut in 
rolls, he would stand in precisely the same posi- 
tion that I stand. Could he, for instance, buy 
a roll of Le Désert? At this very instant I 
would rather hear a performance of Grétry’s 
Richard Cour de Lion, of which an excerpt, 
quoted in Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, has 
haunted me ever since I heard that opera, than 
the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi. Nay! 
I think I would eschew all other pleasures, even 
an evening at the theatre where Delysia plays, 
for an opportunity to attend a performance of 
the rewritten version of Simone Boccanegra. 
I might want to hear it only once, but how very 


[189 ] 


On Hearing What You Want 


much I do want to hear it once! At least I want 
to today. In 1926, when Gatti-Casazza at last 
mounts Simone Boccanegra at the Metropolitan 
Opera House I shall probably go to bed entirely 
ignorant of that fact. Curiosity and desire will 
be equally dead, in all likelihood, so far as Corne- 
lius’s The Barber of Bagdad, Nicolai’s The 
Merry Wives of Windsor, and Berlioz’s Benve- 
nuto Cellini are concerned, when the time arrives 
when it will be easy for me to satisfy this curiosity 
and desire. 

The case with modern music is no better. It 
is just as difficult to gratify an ambition to hear 
Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue as it is to hear 
Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue. The Boston Sym- 
phony Orchestra will no doubt perform Ravel’s 
Le Tombeau de Couperin on the night when I 
am hungry for the Rapsodie Espagnole, and 
Bodanzky will provide this last delight on the 
evening I have begged providence to send me 
Daphnis et Chloé. This is all assuredly music 
in the modern French idiom, although Erik Satie 
has said, “Ravel has refused the Legion of Hon- 
our, but all his music accepts it,’ and we know 
that in ten years this epigram will become a plati- 
tude. Lately, we have heard a good deal from 
the modern Italians, Respighi and Malipiero, but 
I wanted to hear them two years ago. 

On the whole, it is amazing that anybody ever 


[190] 


When You Want It 


acquires a taste for orchestral music or the opera 
at all. We are, it would seem, completely in the 
power of Messrs. Bodanzky, Gatti-Casazza, 
Stokovski, Pierre Monteux, Sargent and Milton 
Aborn, and Fortune Gallo. They not only de- 
termine what we shall hear, they also decide 
when we shall hear it. The situation is mon- 
strous and unbearable. A few comparisons may 
serve to bring the point to you more forcibly. 
Suppose, for instance, that the directors of the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a decree to 
the effect that you could see Manet’s Boy with 
a Sword only on July 17, 1922, and not again 
until February 4, 1930. Suppose that these gen- 
tlemen further ordered that Renoir’s portrait of 
Madame Charpentier would be on view only on 
odd Sundays during Lent. Suppose that the 
Greek vase room or the chamber containing Chi- 
nese porcelains was open to the public only on 
December 6, 1921. Let us imagine another ex- 
ample, even more terror-inspiring. Suppose that 
Messrs. Brentano, Scribner and Putnam arbi- 
trarily made a rule that the public could only buy 
certain books on certain days. On January 1, 
Putnam’s would sell only the works of Harold 
Bell Wright, Brentano’s, only Shaw’s new volume 
of plays, Scribner’s, Joseph NHergesheimer’s 
San Christébal de la Habana. On January 
2, one would be permitted to purchase the novels 


[191] 


On Hearing What You Want 


of James Branch Cabell at Putnam’s, Benedetto 
Croce’s Aésthetic at Brentano’s, and Charles 
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Scribner’s. 
On January 3, Putnam’s would dole out a new 
novel by Sinclair Lewis, Brentano’s would vend a 
book by Arthur Machen (if they could find 
one), and Scribner’s would sell Mencken’s A 
Book of Prefaces. On January 4, I might possi- 
bly persuade Putnam’s to stack the counters with 
The Tiger in the House, Brentano’s would of- 
fer Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, and _ Scrib- 
ner’s would display The Newcomes by William 
Makepiece Thackeray. January 5 would be the 
day to buy Esther Waters at Putnam’s, Wil- 
liam Dean Howells’s Heroines of Fiction at 
Brentano’s, and Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Tarr at 
Scribner’s. On January 6, Putnam’s would sell 
Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of 
Peter Wilkins, Brentano’s, Donald Evans’s Son- 
nets from the Patagonian, and _ Scribner’s, 
Webster’s Dictionary. Naturally, the other book- 
shops and the libraries would also make capri- 
cious decisions about the books of the day. 
This would all appear to be very strange, no 
doubt, and probably all of us would stop buying 
books, because the particular book we wanted 
would never be on sale on the day we wanted it, 


1 Written before the Machen vogue began. 


[192 | 


When You Want It 


but it would be no stranger than the existing 
situation in the concert and opera world. 

And yet, it would appear, there is no remedy. 
It is an unfortunate property of music that it oc- 
cupies time rather than space. Concerts, there- 
fore, must be given within certain hours, and the 
number of pieces that can be played during these 
hours—a concert that lasts over 120 minutes is 
too long—is strictly limited. The Metropolitan 
Opera House can give only one full-length opera, 
or not more than three short ones, in any one 
evening. Somebody, consequently, must make a 
choice, and the directors naturally choose the 
works which they think will appeal to the great- 
est number of people at the time they are played. 
This accounts for the fact that a symphony which 
perhaps has not been performed at all for several 
years will be announced for performance in 
New York by four conductors during as many 
weeks. 

Apparently, therefore, we must put up with 
the inconvenience. We must listen to music 
when we can, where we can, and with whom we 
can, and not when, where, and with whom we 
want to. I wonder if there are others who 
dream of Debussy’s l’Aprés-midi d’un faune 
while they are half-listening to Berlioz’s Fan- 
tastic Symphony, who attend Wagner’s Die 


[193 ] 


On Hearing What You Want 


Meistersinger when they would prefer to hear 
Gluck’s Armide? If some one knows what can 
be done about it, I hope he will tell me. 


December 30, 1920. 


[194] 


Cordite for Concerts 


Since the Florentines, whom we may credit 
with some taste in the matter of art, invented 
the opera, not a month has passed without some 
glabrous-headed numskull or other rising to pro- 
claim shrilly that the lyric drama is a by-blow 
form, not worthy of serious consideration by re- 
spectable, high-minded lovers of music. Others 
than numskulls have offered contributions to this 
popular cause. Addison and Charles Lamb ridi- 
culed the opera, and every critic of today has 
slugged it with cherry-pits and pebbles. What 
seems to have escaped attention is the fact that 
of all music-forms the opera, valiantly withstand- 
ing these attacks, has remained the most consist- 
ently popular. It is even “reformed” every 
half-century or so by a Gluck, a Meyerbeer, a 
Wagner, or a Debussy. Also, I may add, the 
very music critics who affect a staggering con- 
temptuousness for music drama in the abstract 
spend a great deal of unnecessary time at the 
Metropolitan Opera House and write a great 
many unnecessary words about the performances 
there. ‘The explanation of this phenomenon, I 


[195 | 


Cordite for Concerts 


am inclined to believe, after some personal ob- 
servation of the gentlemen in question, is that 
they like it. 

Personally, I will admit frankly that I prefer 
the opera, even when it is bad, to a good sym- 
phony concert. No music is good enough to 
stand up against the depressing circumstances of 
a performance at Carnegie Hall. At the opera, 
on the other hand, there is mystery: a white arm 
laid carelessly over the ledge of a box in the dim 
light; the gleam of the jewels and the silver and 
gold head-dresses in the soft glow; a feather-fan 
half-concealing a whispered word of love or per- 
haps a kiss. Even on the stage, however me- 
diocre the singing and acting, there is some dis- 
play of personality, something to talk about. 
And in the opera house there is the opportunity 
to talk. Besides, I can walk in and walk out, sit 
down or stand up; I am not forced to wait for 
the band to stop playing before I take or relin- 
quish my seat. ‘These are superficial advan- 
tages; the heart of the matter lies deeper: the 
fact is that opera was written for the opera house 
and it belongs there. You may not care for 
opera but, if it amuses you, you like it in the 
opera house. 

Listening recently to a concert given rae the 
Schola Cantorum at Carnegie Hall, a feeling that 
had been groping for expression for some time 


[196] 


Cordite for Concerts 


crystallized within me, a feeling that concerts 
should not be given in halls, a feeling that even 
the idea of the concert as it exists is a false and 
artificial conception. It is impossible for me to 
enjoy music in a brilliantly lighted, badly venti- 
lated auditorium, in the midst of a crowd of eld- 
erly, anserine ladies and gentlemen, or rapt or 
bored or merely fatuous juveniles, the conductor 
panting and sweating, the men of the band saw- 
ing and blowing, and a soprano weighing four 
hundred pounds pufhng through Ocean, thou 
mighty monster! ‘The zest for conductors, Dir- 
igentenliebe, is an amusing form of nympho- 
mania. For there are ladies who prefer the 
baton to the blade. Each must have her own 
particular Kapellmeister. ‘There is impending 
danger of an epidemic of this neurotic disorder, 
and I do not think it an improbable result that, in 
the course of three or four years, New York will 
have thirty or forty symphony orchestras. I 
must admit that attending their concerts would 
give me coeliac pains, but it amuses me to watch 
the fandango from the safe distance which my 
garret affords. It is from that distance, indeed, 
that I shall watch all concerts henceforth. 

Let us consider the occasion to which I have 
just referred. The estimable ladies and gentle- 
men who form the choir of the Schola Cantorum, 
the gentlemen in evening dress, the ladies in white 


[197] 


Cordite for Concerts 


and blue and pink frocks, performed three num- 
bers, the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Credo, from 
Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli. This mass 
is a lofty and noble work. It is also difficult, in 
the sense that all crystal things are difficult, in the 
sense that it is more difficult to sing Vedrai 
carino than it is to sing Vissi d’arte, although 
Puccini’s aria requires a higher and _ heavier 
voice than Mozart’s. ‘The chorus wandered 
through Palestrina’s measures accurately enough, 
no doubt, but the effect was unendurable. This 
mass—any mass—was not composed to be sung 
correctly by ladies and gentlemen in evening 
dress to the polite approbation and discreet ap- 
plause of two thousand Godless souls, the ma- 
jority of whom, it is safe to say, had never set 
foot ina Catholic church. This mass—any mass 
—will only sound right when wafted out of the 
invisible galleries of some dimly lit cathedral, 
odiferous with incense, the emblems and symbols 
of demonology as close to mind in the fantastic 
carvings on the pillars and baptismal fonts as the 
emblems and symbols of angelology in the altar, 
the candles, and the vestments of the celebrating 
priests. The audience, the congregation, what 
you will, must be familiar with the intention of 
the mass, nay more, they must enter into the 
spirit of its celebration and believe in its carmina- 
tive powers. Under such conditions, with how- 


[198] 


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ever little authority the boy Pattis may attack the 
high C’s, the communicants will not be disturbed 
by these descents from the pitch. They will 
either doze decently or be lifted into sublimity, 
and the vagueness of the tones will even enhance 
the effect. Amelita Galli-Curci herself could 
compel me to listen in the gloom of a sweet- 
scented, damp cathedral. 

_ The second part of the program was devoted 
to Spanish folk-music. The ladies and gentle- 
men of the choir, following the ridiculous fashion 
of our concert halls, stood up and stood still 
while they intoned the sardanas and other dance- 
songs, created to be shouted out by peasants, 
stepping merrily about, waving handkerchiefs, 
and exchanging busses. Several of these songs 
were performed as solos by the languorous and 
sinisterly Venusian Marguerite d’Alvarez, who 
gave them an authentic enough interpretation, 
but the very vividness of her recital warned one 
of the falseness of her point of attack. Within 
the respectable confines of Carnegie Hall she 
made her auditors self-conscious. Corsets and 
white shirts grew stiffer. Collars refused to 
wilt. Had she, however, been transplanted to 
some dirty Andalusian tavern, where she might 
sit in a corner, wrapped sombrely in a splendid 
Manila shawl, while she sang in the smoke-laden 
atmosphere to the accompaniment of the strum- 


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ming of guitars and to the shrill cries of a dozen 
Gipsy girls, her 


Viva Triana! 
Vivan los Sevillanos 
y Sevillanas! 


would flame into life; even the cradle-songs and 
celebrations of the Virgin Mary would make 
their true effect. 

There is a place for hearing music as well as a 
time, and I have sworn a vow that if I can only 
listen to music in the concert hall I shall hear it 
no more... unless, like the ladies, I may be 
permitted to choose my own conductor and en- 
joy the delights of Dirigentenliebe, and here the 
ladies hold me at a disadvantage, for Alice Del- 
ysia and Pola Negri do not wave the baton with 
the authentic gesture of Arthur Nikisch and 
Thomas Beecham. ‘To return to my theorem, 
let me particularize: why do you enjoy l’Aprés- 
midi d’un faune more when it is presented as a 
ballet than when it is performed in the concert 
hall? Because the music is played in a sugges- 
tive atmosphere, the action and the colours and 
the lights supplying the place inadequately filled 
in the concert hall by the program notes, which 
are rustled and turned while the flute purls softly. 
The ideal spot, however, in which to listen to 


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this music would be an ancient hillside near some 
ruined Greek temple, the band hidden and mys- 
terious and not too near. ‘Then one could imag- 
ine the stately, obscene ceremony between the 
faun and the nymphs. 

Chopin’s music, indubitably, should be per- 
formed in a drawing-room, an Empire or a Louis 
XVI drawing-room, to be precise. ‘There should 
be countesses present, with firm round breasts 
and spreading crinolines, and if a princess or an 
archduchess can be provided, so much the better. 
Between the mazurkas and the polonaises, serv- 
ants in livery should pass ices, and if a young 
woman can be persuaded to faint occasionally, 
the effect will be heightened. The flowers 
should be lilies, tube-roses, and gardenias, pale 
but strongly aromatic blooms. 

Funeral marches, wedding marches, and 
Strauss waltzes fall into their proper environ- 
ments at times, but where should one listen to 
the music of Brahms? Experience tells me that 
the music of Brahms sounds best in a German 
public garden, with plenty of good beer, Pilsener 
or Miinchener, according to your taste, in hefty 
seidels close at hand, and more good beer in vast 
barrels in the nearby cellar. It will do no harm 
to eat black and white radishes while you give 
ear to the F major, and Frankfurters will be 
found to go excellently well with the D major. 


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Brahms would be the first to be delighted with 
this scheme, and if he is conducting his scores in 
the halls of Eblis, I have no doubt he has al- 
ready experimented with it himself, 

For the Mozart symphonies a rococo ball- 
room is required, the ceiling elaborately orna- 
mented with gold Eroses and stucco roses. If 
Fragonard or Boucher painted the wall-panels, 
that will be an advantage, and it will do no hurt 
to the music if they be a little indecent. ‘The 
orchestra will be visible and the men must wear 
red coats and knee breeches of some eighteenth 
century style, and they must be peruked. The 
leader must wear the tallest peruke of all (it 
should tower two feet above his head), and how- 
ever high he may stand on his toes in the ecstasy 
of the beat, his heels must never leave the floor, 
for these heels, red, too, should be five inches 
high. 

Scriabin designed a temple suitable for the 
performances of his own music, music which de- 
mands a certain amount of subaudition, a temple 
of odours and colours that might have pleased 
des Esseintes. ‘Chis temple has not yet been con- 
structed, but compromises have been attempted. 
For instance, the Russian Symphony Orchestra 
once played Scriabin’s Prometheus before a 
moving-picture screen on which coloured lights 
were projected and merged by means of a key- | 


[ 202 | 


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board with an electrical attachment. An effort 
to illustrate Siegfried’s Rhine Journey with 
appropriate accompanying action in a washtub 
would make an analogous effect. 

Leo Ornstein, whose favourite figure in com- 
position is anacoluthon, should play his music 
on a piano balanced on a pushcart, the whole 
moved to the middle of Manhattan Bridge. His 
audience should pass in motor-cars, the chauf- 
feurs tooting their sirens, in street-cars, the 
motormen madly clanging their bells, and 
in aeroplanes, with their engines throbbing 
vehemently. The result would be Jovian. I 
» have enjoyed The Wild Men’s Dance and 
Impressions of the Thames even in the concert 
hall but, if I heard them under these circum- 
stances, I should probably break a blood-vessel. 

Where should the music of Richard Strauss be 
performed? Hardly any two of his composi- 
tions in the same place, I should say. Fin Hel- 
denleben would sound best in front of the banal 
colonnade and monument of Vittorio Emanuele 
at Rome; the Sinfonia Domestica in Wana- 
maker’s; Don Quixote in a farmyard; Tod 
und Verklarung in Roosevelt Hospital; and 
Don Juan in a brothel or, at least, a Temple 
of Love. In lieu of program notes, copies of 
the Contes drolatiques, the Sonnets of Pietro 
Aretino, and Le Journal d’une femme de 


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chambre should be distributed to the customers. 

Chamber music, as I have pointed out else- 
where,' is written to be played and not to be lis- 
tened to. Such pleasure as it gives is subjective 
rather than objective. As songs are a species of 
chamber music they are perhaps most effective 
if sung in a drawing-room, although there are 
exceptions to this rule. I have carried d’Alvarez 
and her Spanish ditties to an Andalusian tavern. 
The Two Grenadiers should be sung in vaude- 
ville; Debussy’s La Chevelure should be sung 
in bed; and Mrs. Beach’s The Year’s at the 
Spring should be sung at the meetings of the 
National Institute of Arts and Letters. As for 
the song recital, so-called, it is an abomination, 
a monstrous form of entertainment foisted on 
the public by the musical snobs who insist that 
the program shall be arranged according to their 
laws, a classic group, a group of German lieder, 
a French group, etc., and that the singer shall 
interpret these without a gesture, standing dig- 
nifiedly near the centre of the platform. There 
are signs that healthy interpreters with a touch 
of genius are breaking away from this absurd 
tradition. 

Only concertos seem to belong exclusively to 
the concert hall. They are written for just this 


1 Music for Museums, a paper in Music After the Great War. 


[204 | 


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kind of audience, just this kind of place. The 
soloist, violinist or singer or jew’s-harpist, dram- 
atizes the thing and centres the attention visually 
on himself. It is Kreisler’s Beethoven, or 
Ysaye’s Beethoven, or Sarasate’s, or Pagan- 
ini’s, or Liszt’s. Yes, this is freak music and 
the atmosphere of the concert hall is entirely 
consistent with it. 

To conclude in a major key, I would say that 
it is obvious that some music should never be 
played anywhere. At the head of this class 
stand the compositions of Sir Edward Elgar. 


July 1, 1921. 


[205 | 

















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